Educating for Democracy

Paideia in an Age of Uncertainty

BY ALANM. OLSON, DAVIDM. STEWER,

EDITED
AND m A $. TUULI

R O W M A N & LITTLEFIELD P U B L I S H E R S , INC.

-
Lan ham Boulder New York Toronto Oxford
 Interreligious Dialogues during the
Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Vittorio Hosle

For Dmitri Nikulin, brilliant

faithful in~erloccuor,wrse friend:

Vt credal quod tu, nuiIum ui cogere relnpra;

sola qudppc purest k c racione tmhi.
extorque re potes Jdei rnendaciafrusrm:
ipsrrfides non ui, ser rrrcione vemt.

Petrus Abaelardus, Carmen ad Asrmiabium. 783-786

One of the defining features of religiosity in the contemporary world is he fact

that almost every religious person is confronted, already in his immediate life -
world, with a plurality of religious offers. This is one of he necessay conse-
quences of globaIizatjon-the expansion of our h~storicaland geographical hori-
zon, the mixing of people through migrations and journeys, the presence of all
possible ideas in a global marketplace, as realized i n its most diffuse form by the
Internel, renders the access to alternative religious traditions something natural
and even ohvious. In modern European history, however, this is something quite
new, Even after the collapse of the religious unity in Reformation, most Eum-
pean countries remained for polit~calreasons denornjnationally homogeneous,
and also in a denominationally mixed country like Germany, the principle of
"cuius regio, ejus religio" guaranteed that in most states within the Holy Roman
Empire the large majority of rhe people helonged to one denomination. Of
course, in most European countries there was a Jewish minority, but it was often
relegated ro a ghetto and almost always excluded from full citizen rights. Fur-
thermore, the Jews did nor represent for Christians radical religious alterity,
since their central sacred book, rhe Old Testament, was part of the Christian
canon. This slate of affairs lasted till long into [he twentieth century-in his re-
.'
cent a u ~ o b i o ~ r a Johannes
~h~ Hosle described the dosed cosmos of a Southern
German Catholir: village of rhe 1930s and 1940s, in which even Protcstant~sm
was something only rumored about and an alternatrve to the Calholic worldvicw
was radjcally inconceivable.
The social conditions of such a form of religiosity have disappeared I n rhe
second half o f the twentieth century, and the Second Vatican Council w a the
remarkable theological atternpl to deal with the mew situation, which rendered
the exrra ecc'clesiam nuila salus mnre and more obsolete and even ~nsulbng..4
complex theology of non-t'hnstian religions developed. which tried to rnediap
between rhe claim to absvlutcness intrillsic to most religions (ceminly to Chris-
tianity j and fie pluralily of religious traditions. Besides the mnrt?traditional ex+
clwivist approac-h, both inclusivist and plurslisr theologies of religion were
e~aboraterl.~ The results of these new theological approaches have k e n both a
greater openness to non-Christian religions and a foundering of the religioa
certain ties that characterixed Christianity ful- alrnost two millenia. The latter
process was met wirh disapproval by many traditional Christians, and ~nmetime?
one cannot avoid h e impression h a t the differences between the more tradition-
a114 ~rienteddefenders of a religion and the more "liberal" i n t e r p e w s of thc
same religion are even sharper and more embitteed than rhose between people
betonging to different religions, as bng as they are interpreted, on the meraleuel.
in a somehow analogous way. In any case, one thing is hardly dubinr~s:A re-
sponsiblc r~ligiouseducation in the twenty-first century must address the issue
of [he existence or' different reljgjons in a Far more intensive way than i t did be-
fore.T h e capdcily of interatting wilh other religions in 3 way hat tries to learn
from them withotlt henaying the cornmi trnenl to certain absolute prjnciples-a
commitment thar constitutes [he essence of religion-will probably he a crucial
competence in a globalised. but for the distanr f u m e religiously hererogeneaus
world.
Fonunately such a capacity need not be developed from scratch. The me-
dieval world wa.5 in some aspects religiously rriorc diverse than the world of
early modernity--the facl h a t !he Greek tradition was recovered by rha Occi-
dent pady through rhe Arab mediation rendered Islam in the Middle Ages a far
greaier intellectual challenge far Christians than it was from the sixtcenlh sen-
rury onward. m e r n i l i t a ~successes of the Ottoman Empire were not matched
by comparable intr?llectual innovations. and the scientific revolution certainly
loosened !he relation of Europe to the non-Christian world.) Not only did Chris-
lian medieval tlxeologians and philosophers deal in long treatises with h e other
two non-Christian monotheist religions, they used the literary genre of tht: dia-
logue ro show how an intellectually and morally sadsfying intellectual encounter
with ~7the~ reIigions mghr so take place. Of course, thew dialogues anrecede two
of the great challenges that profoundly transformed Christianity-the emergence
of modern natural scieuce and of modern historical thinking.3 None of the au-
thors I will discuss in the following, not even the historically and philologically
erudite Bodin, has the broad and precise knowledge that history of religion and
hisrorical ~heologyacquired abou~other religions as well as a h u the ~ develop-
ment afone's own tradition from he tiph~eenrhcenlury onward. Still. 1 do think
thar much can be karncd frurn these dialogues. 1will focus on both the pragnlat-
ics of ihe interreligious exchangc (1) as weII as-verq shonly and supcrfi-
cially-some of the the main arguments (11) one can find in those four works
rha~probably are the most original and rich intar,rcligious diitlogues from the
twelfth to the sixreen th cen tury-Peter Abelard's Coll~riones(Uiulagus inrer
 Intedi@ous Dialogues d-ng the Middle Ages and Early Mderr~ily 61

p h i ~ o s ~ p ~ ~Jdaeum
um. et Christianum), Ramon Llull's Llibre del gent11 e deB
tres sauis, Nicholas of Cusa's D e pacefidei, md Jean Badin's Colloquium h@p-
fnplorntlres d~ nhditis re- sublimium a r ~ 0 n i . s . ~
Those four dialogues, which will be compared and contrasted in the follow-
ing, a r t connected w i h each other: Even if it is not clear whether Llull knew
hbelard5--1 regard it as unlikely- Cusanus must have studied Llull's dialogue,6
and Bodin reacls explicitly, I think, lo Cusarlus's: interreligious dialogue. In Abe-
lard's dialogue the author is asked in a dream vision to function as judge in a
controversy between a Jew, s Christian, and a phjlosopher not bound by arty
religious faith, but of lsrnaeliric descent ( would
I nor exclude that Abelard might
have had in m ~ n done of the MusIim rationalists la Ibn ~ u f a ~ l ' }he ; does ~ o t
give my judgmen~but listens to a dialogue first between the Jew and the phi-
losopher, then between the Christian and the philosopher. (I do not share the
opinion of sanle that a third part containing a discussion between h e Jew and
the Chrjstian was ever planned.) Llull's dialogue brings a gentile uho despairs
out of fear of death in contact with three wise men, namely a Jew, a ChAst~an,
and a Muslim, one of whom-it is not said w h e i n the first pan of the work
convinces the gentile of the existence uf God and the immortality of the soul; h$
great pleasure. however, is transfomed in e\en greater despair, when he is
asked lo convm tu one of the three monotheisljc religions, since he now Faces
eternal damnation if he does not make the right choice; and so fjrst the Jew, then
rhe Christian, finally the Muslim present the arguments in favor of their own
religion. Even if the gentile at the end declares thal he has made his choice. the
wise men do not want to hear it so that they may continue ro discuss among each
other which of the rhree religions is the true one Cusanus's work describes a
vision in which the hero, easily iden€ifiable with Cusanus himself, is brought to
heaven where he listens to the complaints of angels before God aMur religiously
motivated violence: God, at the rccornrnendation of the Wwd, asks his angels to
bdng before him philosophical represe~lta~ives uT h e vanous nadons (and thus
religions): before the Word. they discuss their religious differences and are then
sent back with the order to gather in Jerusalem lo agree on one common relig-
ion. Finally, Bodin's dialogue, by far the longest, richest, and formally most
complex of the works, consists of six books in which scved perSOdS converse
lirsr on physical and metaphysical, then on reiigious matters in the house of a
Venetian gentleman, Paulus Coronaeus. The host is a Catholic; his guests are the
Lutheran rnathemarician Fridericus Podamicus, !he Cnlvinin jurisl Antonius
Curtius, the old Jew Salomon Barcasdus, the Italian Octavius Fagnola, who
converted to Islam after having been captured by Muslim pirates the reveals
himself as Muslim only in he rnlddle of the fourth book), the defender nf a ra-
I ~ o n n l theology {closer to Plato than Aristotle) Diegus Toralba, and finally
fieronymus Smarnus, also na bound by any historical religion, but defending
all of them on rhe basis of a negarive theology and of a skepticism reminiscen~
of Montaigne, after whom I rhink he could have been modeled.
62 Vittorio Bfisie

The choice of the form in which a philosopher communicates his thought deter-
mines far more of its conlent h a n hisrorians of philosophy usually realize. The
Iiterary dialogue, for allnws the author to hold brick his own upir~ions
i n a way (hat i s not feasible in a rrealise-&t least as long as he hirnseIf is nut an
interlocutor in the dialogue; and even when he is, a distancing from oneself is
possible. Ir has often been debated how Pctrus Abaelardus-I mean now not the
author, but the person of the Cullariones asked to function as iudex who clearly
has to he distinguished from [he real person who wrote the dialogue as well as.
~ narratorG-relates lo the Chrisriunus, who de-
albeit to o lesscr degree, f r u ~ rthe
velops so many of Abelard's tcnecs, and it has been rightly remarked that the
two are consciously distinguished by Abelard he aurhor: The Cl~riscianusis that
side of the real person who identified with the Christian tradition in which he
was brought up; Abaelardus, however, is the more complex figure who could
lean hack from his own religious backgmund and confrnnt Christianity with the
Jewlsh religion as well as with a philosophy not committed to any revelation."
Indeed. the Philosophu~,roo, mirrors a s p w s of the real Abelard, and perhaps
this i s one of the funcfions of the nactnmal, drearnllke vision within which he
dialogue takes place-namely to show that at least two of the ioteriocutors and
the iudex are facels of Abelard's complex personalily.
By rendering unusual hermeneutical efforts necessary, the dialogue engages
the reader in a particularl) challenging way-dven if every text constitules an
invitation to a dialogue between the author and the readers, dialogid texts usu-
ally provoke 3 more interesting dialogue between the aulhor and he readers
than, for example. essays. This appeal to the autonomy of the reader can even be
increased when the work remains 3 fragment. Thus a distinctive feature of A h -
lard's dialogue is iis unfinished character. While the traditional view was that
Abelard was prevented by his death in 1142 to complete the work written in his
last years at Cluny, newer studies have made it more and more likely that the
work was written in the I IXsor 1130s." Ofcourx. this poses the question why
Abelard left the work unfinished-or, better, whether the work is really un6n-
ished or whether .4belatd coflxiously decided to break ir off. There are indeed
argumenrs for the latter view (which would make of Abelard somehow a medie-
val predecessor o f ~ o d i n ) ' ~ - bsuppressing
~ the iudex's final judgment, Abelmd
could have deliberately chosen an aposiopesis for pcdagagical rrascsns. "In its
present form, the Dialug~iethrusts the reader in to the magisterial role: the three
interlocutors have presented their cases; those open ro learn from cross-cul turd
discussions mus! decide thc question for ~hc~r~selves."'"Acss radical and per-
haps more likely interpretaiion of the abrupt end i s thar "Abelard decided to
bring the work to a provisiclnal conclusion. leaving it open to him to continue it
at somc larcr dale ~ihe chose.""
However this spcific question may be solved, there is little doubt that most
dialogues, just by proposrng different slances, obliges readers to rake a position
themselves. This is at lrasr the case when we have a dialogue betwern partners
 Interreligious 'Dialugues during the Middle Ages and Early Mcdemity 63

that are more or less on an equal footing or, better, where the superiority o f one

,
of the interlocutors is not as cvident as in those dialogues between a reacher and
pupil thal consutute the majority of the medieval philosophical dialoguts.
i j a u s Jacobi has rightly remarked that a fjrst rough classification of medieval
,,hiIosophica1 dialogues is that in dialogues between teachers and pupils and
interreligious dialogues between Christians, Jews, pagans, and philosophers,
even if there are transitions between the two forms-notably in Gilbertus
~ ~ i s p i f i u s 'Disputatio
s Christiani cum ~ e n t i l i . " Among the four dialoguas I
want to focus on, certainly Cusanus's De pacefidei comes closest to a dialogue
be[\VWn teacher and pupil-for in 11 not only Peter and Paul, but also the Ver-
bum coro factum speaks, and obviously with a voice no less authorjtative than
that of h e normal medieval teacher. StilI, jn rhe dialogue beginning in chapter 3
there are seventeen other intwIocutors, ail of whom are humans,who are more
or: less on an equal footing with each other (nol, however, with the Word and the
saints). Naturally, it is of exrreme importance lo distinguish between those dia-
logues in which the equaIity of the partners i s only formal and those in which it
is essential-i.e., between those dialogues where the author clearly oprs for the
position o f one of the interIocutors. even if all are treated by him with respect
and hey also deal with each other with courtesy, and those where the author
does no! seem to side with anybody or seems to grant every side a partial truth.
Somelimes ir may be hermeneuljcally difficult to find out what the author's in-
temion really was: but since in the cases of all of our authors-differently from
Plato, whose dialogues, however, are always dialogues among radically unequal
person-we have several works that are nondialogical, we are not in too dif'fi-
cult a posirion. Thus it is obvious to anybody who has looked at, for example,
the Llibre de contentplaci6 en D&u that Llull did not harbor any doubt about the
superiority of the arguments developed by the Christian4espire he fact that in
his dialogue the inrermediate posilion of the Christian between Jew and Muslim
does no1 signal any special value of Christianity and that the decision of the gen-
tile for mr: of the three monotheislic religions remains secret, since the thrce
wise men don't want to know it. Bodin, on the other hand, who in his life wa-
vered between Catholicism, rational theology, perhaps the Reformation-even if
the person in Geneva may well have been a namesake of him-and ~udaisrn,'~
does not seem far from the spirit of Lessing's ring parable in Nathan der Weise
and even from modern pluralism: The first, second, and sixth book of the Hep-
taplomeres end with he playing of music, and the fourth book begins with a
discussion of harmony-suggesting probably that the pluraIiry of religions i s
wanted bv God, insofar as it contributes to the complexity of the harmony of the
universe. "I think harmony is produced when many sounds can be blended; but
when the? cannot be blended, one conquers the other as the sound enters rhe ear,
and the dissonance offends the delica~esenses of wiser men,"" says Octavius.
Or as Toralba puts it: "These discussions would offer no purposc or pleasure
unless they took lustre from opposing arguments and reasons."18 On the other
hand, it firs the idea that also this principle is opposed: Srnatrlus thinks that a
state without wicked people would be happier than one wilh both good and
wicked ones, and with this usual sarcasm he asks whether \here: are civil wal
even among ange1s.l9
4 s we have seen, the dialogue to which h e author inviles: his reader de
pen& also on the t y p of the dialogue i n which the interlocutors created by hjr
engage. Indeed, lirerary dialogues are not only aiming at a real future dialogu,
betwzen the author and its jnterpreters, they represent a past dialogue, either rea
or, in most cases, fictiliuus. Even where a real dialogue may have occurrcd ir
the past, the laws d the genre oblige the author to transcend the brute factualit;
and to idealize it, albeil to varying degrees. Bodin's Cnlloquium comes cIoscs
(0 a real-life dialogue, but this contributes to the lack of concentration of th
work, its repetitions and digressions. We have to distinguish from the questio~
whether there was a real-life basis for t h e literary Jialoguz-a question that uan
scends the literary work-the immanent literary question whether the text pre,
tends lo repeselll a real dialogue or not. Of our four dialogues, fm exsmpie
only mo-Llull's and Bodin's---claim lo depict such a real dialogue; Abelard':
and Cusanus's dialogues pretend lo represent drzams or visions within whicl
dialogues occurred; the ontological status of the dialoguc partrlzts is thus, ac-
cording to the literary text itself, somehow deficient. Even if Llull's and Bodin's
texts depict real dialogues, the introduction to the prologue of tlull's Llibrd
clearly shows thal he waou the reader lo recognize the fictional characler of his
dialogue. whose frame story is reminiscent of fairy tales. Bodin, on the conuary,
wants to convey the impression that his dialogue really took place- the chornc-
lers are clearly individualized, far more than in Abelard, whose characters are
types, but still with some psychol%ically interesljng peculiarities (the types of
Llull and Cusanus lack even peculiar trails). Thr cenuaI problenls of the dia-
logue are only slowly and tactfully approached, and the narrator. who claims to
have Iistened to Ihe dialogues as kophon pmsopon, presenrs himself shortly in
the Ie~terto N.T., within which the dialogue is narrated. The letter vies with
travel narratives (imitated also in More's Utopia), but since travels constitu~ean
important part of the life experience of the sixteenth ccntury, this on1y er~llances
the realistic atmosphere of the dialogue.
What are the formal features of the exchange among the interlocutors within
n dialogue? Each of our dialogues presupposes, first and foremost, that the en-
counm between retigions should not occur in the medium of violence.Even if
h e later Llull defended the idea of the crusades. his early work, also the Llibre
del gentil e dels rres savis, is committed i o the idea of peaceful exchange be-
Lween r e ~ i ~ j o nCusanus's
s;~~ dialogue i s an explicit reaction to the fall of Con-
, ~ ' Bdin's work is an attempt to ropose an alternative to the
s t a n ~ i n n ~ l eand
madness of the reiigious wars of the sixteenth century. Venice is praised at the
beginning of the Colloquium because of its libefly, which i s conaasted with the
civil wars of other stares," and the work ends with a sharp condemnation o f the
use of force i n religious matters, recently mainly against Jews and Musiims in
Spain and Portugal. and with a general ngretment on religious t o l c ~ n c c Even
.~
if in Bodin there is no longer the hope thal people can come to a consensus in
substantial religious matters, there stit[ is an agreement on how one has ro deal
 lntemligious Dialogues during the Middle Ages and Eady Modernity 65

with persons with whose religion ane does not agree. T h e renouncement of vio-
lence is already presupposed by the form of the dialogue: For a real dialogue is
different from a strategic bargaining that may well usher in violence, since i t is
based on the sincere desire to learn from each other and to arrive together at !he
truth. For that. certain procedures have to be agreed upon and respected: When
in Llull's dialogue firs1 the Christian, then the Jew and the Christian want to
the Muslim (who in the first case had ascribed the Christian an inter-
preiatrnn of the Trinity which he had rejecred before), the pagan interrupts
lhem-it is not their turn to make objections; only he, the pagan, is allowed to
do so.24
Nevertheless, the authors of our dialogues are realistic enough to know thar
power relations remain important in the real dialogues that occur among hu-
mans, that particularly in interreligious cor~troversiespeople tend to hurt. each
other and that the willingness to subject oneself to the demands of truth is rarely
unconditional. Probably Cusanus's dialogue is the most ngve in this respect-
since the dialogue presents an absolute, divine authority that cannot be chal-
lenged without impiety, Cusanus might have rhought to be allowed to abstract
from power relations among humans. But the reality of human dialogues is tha~
no one has direct access to the insights of the Divine Word, and [his leads almost
necessarily to differences that are hard 10 reconcile. Furthermore, there is a
certain na'ivetb in Cusanus's text not so much because i t inevitably anhopo-
rnorphizes God who has to be asked by the archangel and the Word to act; the
nalveth consists far more in the fact that the frome of his dialogue already pre-
supposes the truth of Christianiry--even if in the course of the dialogue he tries
to give ralional arguments for the Christian podtion. Still this kame is responsi-
ble for the fact that an explicit consensus is achieved only in this dialogue-at
least in heaven. since its implementation in the human council in Jerusalem re-
mains n task.
In contrast, the place where the dialogue described by Llull is supposed to
occur is characterized by absolute neutrality-it is a forest with all the propenies
of the traditional locus amoenus (familiar, with a different function, from both
Plato's Phaerirus and Cicero's De Iegibus), but at the same time alIegorically
ennobled by the presence of Lady Intelligence and fjve trees whose flowers
stand for virtues, sins, and vices. Jn this forest, which the power structures of the
ciry do nor seem to penetrare, the interaction between the three wise men is de-
termined by complete symmetry, manifesked, for example, by the fact that Llull
often writes "one of the wise men ~ a i d " ~ ~ - ijst not relevant who takes the initia-
tive. In order to honor the others, nobody wants to begin to expose his religion
first-it is the gentile who finally chooses according to a chronological crite-
rionnz6Of course, there is an initial asymmetry between the three wise men on
the ore hand and rhe gentile on Ihe other, but i t is somehow invend ar the end,
when the gentile not only is able to sum up all the argumenw he had patierllly
listened to,27but also shows such a profound religiosily that the three wise men
feel humbled by A particularly beautiful trail is thar ihe three wise men a!
the end ask-and grant-forgi veness from--arid t-ach other for any disrc-
spectful word they might have used against the others' religions.29
Certainly the neutralily i s insofar apparent, as the mehod proposed by Lady
Intelligence is Llult's specific combinatory method. the so-called Ars, that
makes most of his works so tiresome to read. EJo author can abstract from his
own standpoint, and perhaps Abelard is more honest when he makes himself the
judge, even if as a Christian he is party to the conrroversy-pmjcularly since he
then leaves the judgment to the reader. It is remarkable [hat the argumentative
styIe o i the two parts of his dialogue is quite different-the dialogue between
the Jew and the philosopher i s characterized by less freedom of speech and by a
greater inequality than the dialogue between the Christian and the philosopher.
True, in the second part the philosopher who had been the indlectually superior
in the first is now in turn led himself by a superior mind. but despire the in~ellec-
tual asymmerry in both parts the relation between the lwo interlocutors becomes
far more agreeable in the second part-the interlocutors liaen with the intent to
leam from each other; h e Christian, for example, lakes the philosopher's objec-
tlons seriously? Abelard makes it clcar that the arrogance of the philosopher as
well as secular fears consciously and sublimjnally limit the freedom of expres-
sion of the ~ e w , while
~' there are no such obstacles in the second discourse. The
philosopher revokes his remarks about h e madness of the Christians-they were
only intended to provoke a frank discussion and are therefore forgivenR-, but
he conljnues to speak about the Jews in derogatory terms, even as anirna1s.3~
Also Lluli's Jew complains about h e fate of his n a ~ i o nonly
; ~ ~ Cusanus does not
deal with the political inequaiily of the Jews in the Middle Ages, and Cusanus
even ascribes to his Pcter as an aggressive antidudaic remark-not loo surpris-
ingly given Cusanus's own policies against the ~ews."' 'Rodin, on the other hand,
who was probably of Jewish descent, has an awareness not inferior to Abelard's
of the fears of the Jews. But while the Jew in Abelard is unable to overcome
them, in Bodin's Co!loquium he succeeds in doing so-thanks to the generous
encouragement of his host.
In Bodin's work the place of the djscourse is the house of one or the inter-
locutors, but Bodin does much to convince h e reader that this fact does not di-
minish the neutrality of the place. First, the house is a microcosmos in which
one can find not only all possible books and instrumenls, but dso the pantotheca
where in b x e s models of almost all basic enlilies of the world are kept. Second,
the host is a man of exquisite characler-a man seriously committed at the same
time to ~atholicisrn,3~ intellectual curiosity, and religious tolerance (possibly
modeled after the great Cardinal Gasparo Contarini), of great kindness to his
guests whose religious feelings he never hurts (in contrasl particularly lo the
irascible Lutheran Fridericus) and whom hc invites again and again to speak
freely. His own contributions are not intellectuaHy overwhelming, and he does
not speak as much as others, bill i t is he who gently direcls \he flow r,C the con-
versation and eliminates obsracles where they emerge. One of the most touching
passages is when he asks his friends to pray for him? The move I S also an as-
tule one, because he wants to show that it i s pious to pray to the saints: but it is
 Tnterreligious Dialogues dufing the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 67

famore than that and contrasts with Fridericus's brutal rejection of Salomon's
remark that the Jews pray for the non-~ews.~' The Muslim Octavius thanks
Coronaeus for all the kindness he has done to him-an apostate from Calholi-
dsm39-, and again this contrasts with Curtius's condescension toward the poor
~ ~ ~ l and i mFri.dericus7s
s ~ vulgar comment^.^' When Coronaeus mingles artifi-
cial apples with real ones, offers both to his guests and Fridericus bites into an
artificial one, Coronaeus gives him and all the others a subtle Iesson-to be
more careful with our truth claims regarding complex quesdons, if even our
senses can so easily be de~eived.~' Even if we cannot be sure h a t Bodin re-
garded himself as a Catholic when he wrote the Heptaplameres and although it
is obvious that, if he did, he lacked the religious certainty of a Coronaeus, one
feels Bodin's veneration and even lave for this type of person. Probably Bodin's
sympathy is not diminished by the fact that Coronaeus, in practice the most tol-
erant of all interIocutors, in theory accepts the doctrine of the Catholic church
that people ought to be forced to go to public religious services;'"or Bodin is
well aware of the contradictions that belong to human nature-the aggressive
Fridericus is theoretically more tolerant a a n ~ o r o n a e u s ~ ~ -and
, practice counts
for him more than theory.
Few passages in the Colioquiwn are as intense as when the interlocutors fi-
nally begin to talk about religion. Only at the end of the third book the question
is pul "whelher it is proper for a good man to talk about and when
after the already mentioned discussion on harmony the interlocutors finally face
h e issue, it proves diffjcull lo motivate SaIomon, the Jew, to take part in it. On
the one hand, people had agreed hat even the crassest superstition is berter than
the lack of religion,'6 and Salomon is afraid that a conversation about religion
may uproot a person's piety without replacing it wjlh something better. He IS
seconded by Senamus, who on the one hand defends Aristolle, even when there
are slrong empirical arguments against his !heories,P7but on the other hand IS the
most skeptically inclined mind and just because of that supports h e lraditional
religion, whatever it may be: "Even if a new religion is better or truer than an
old religion I ~hinkit should no! be proclajmed.''8 But even more impcrlanl than
the altruisdc regard for other persons' mental stability is Salomon's fcar. rooled
in historical experience, h a t such a discussion may Iead to hamd agains~the
Jews. Therefore Salomon remains silenl even a f ~ wthe Lu~heranmathernadcian
Friderjcus explains that only public religious discussions are dangerous, no! pri-
vate on=. Salornon's reslraint i s understandabIe, pmicuIarly since f ridericus's
remarks, comparing him with a viper, are insulting and show h a t while he wants
10 converl Salomon to Christianity, hc is not at all willing to put his own faith at
stake. It is in this siruation tha! Coronaeus declares: ''1 pledge 10 Salomon thar ht:
will bring lo all of us he grearesl knowledge and delight thmugh his speech, and
nothing wilt be more gratifying ko me than for each among us to enjoy the grcar-
est freedom in speakjng about re~igion.""~ Salornon still wavers and men[ions
very critically the oldest dialogue bc~weenthe representatives of two monotheis-
tic rel~gions,Justin's Pros Tryphona ludoiot~dialoqos: "I remernber reading a
d~alogueof Justin Martyr with Trypha the Jew. whom he presents so untutored
and foolish hat I was annoyed with the work and the foolishness of the write
Indeed the author decrees victory, just as lhe braggart warrior standing i n th
theater." He mentions furthermore his old age that makes it almosr jmpossiM
for him 10 change his religious atlegiance and continues Lo be afraid that such
religious discussjon may destroy his friendship with his inlerlocutors. Coronaell
reassures Mrn again; Salomon still hesitates, and other jnterlocutors share hi
concern thal the rijscussjon of rel~gjonsmay endanger public peace. One has b
mention that Coronaeus keeps his pledge: When Salomon decides ro open hi
heart and, after further withdrawals, finally raises the sharpest objections agai~l~
Catholicism in the most vehement form, the other guesrs become silent, becaus
they feel that Coronaeus is hurt; but the gentle host manages to restrain hjrnse1
and says only: "1 thought I would remove the ccharges and complaints of Salo
mon, but I think I should defer to another time, lest I seem to have harnperec
anyone's liberty of speaking."50

Far more important thm the polit~calarguments against an interreligious dia

lugue are the epistemologicaI ones-and with their analysis we leave the prag
matic and enler the theoretical level of h e works. Twalba regards faith as some.
thing distinct from both knowledge and and while Curtius and
Coronaeus think that there is a moral duty to try to convm people belonging IG
other religions, it i s Senarnus who asks the decisive question: "Who will be the
arbiter of such a c o n ~ u v t . ~ s ~ ?Fridericus's
''~~ answer 3s of touching naivetC:
"Christ the b r d ! For He said that if three were gathered together in His name
He would be in their midst." As Senarnus objects, just this is the point of dis-
agreement between Ctmstians and the other monotheistic religions whether
Christ is God or not. Curtius-whose level of argument as we11 as courtesy of
manners is far superior to that of Fridericus, as Calvin's co that of Luther's-
says sometlung more valid, when he asks for "suitable witnesses and refer-
ences." Still, Senarnus says "It i s doubtful what witnesses are reliable. what
recurds we trustworthy, what bondsmen are secure in deterrninins a certain and
sure faith." The nexl to offer a crilerion 1s Coronaeus, and he is as nai've as
Fridericus: "me church will be the judge." It is not hard for Scnamus tu r c a ~ l ;
"An even more serious problem is what is the true church? The Jews say that
their church is the true one, and rhe Mohammedans deny it. On the other hand,
the Christian makes n claim for his ctiurvh, and the pagans in India say their
church fiught to have preference over all others because of its age. And so the
very learned Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa wrote he must represent nothing about
the Christian church, but by pusiting the foundaticn that the church rests on i t s
union with Christ, he assumes that which i s the chief point of debate."53And
indeed Salornon claims lhat he Hebrews orc thc one uue church of God, while
Fidericus limits the n t h of [his statement to the time before Christ, and Octa-
vius avers that !he New Testamen1 has been comptcd. Tne rarionalist Toralha
 InterreIigious Dialogues during the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 69

,i n ~ d u c e sthe criterion of the wise men. but it is open to doubt who is wise, as
,Senamus states. And when finally God himself is claimed to be the finaI author-
ity, Senamus agrees: "Necessarily, the religion which has God as its author is
,the true religion, but the difficulty is in discerning whether We is the aurhor of
'hisreligion or that religion. This is the task and difficulty." Nor do miracles and
oracles help, particularly since they can be done and given also by magjcians.
Hcither is the duration of a religion a good criterion?
In fact, the HeptapIomeres does nnt end at all with religious agreemenl. The
jnterlocut~rsembrace each other, but decide to hold "no other conversarion
about religions, although each one defended his own religion with the supreme
sanctity of his ~ife"~~-jnsharp conrrast to Lluil's Llibre. at whose only appar-
en~jyopen end the three wise men decide to continue their discussjons tili they
will come to an agreement?6 What are the reasons for this failure-ifit is a Fail-
ure, for the civility and friendship of Bodin's interlocutors me the more remark-
able, the less hey agree substan~iall~?" T ihjnk at least three faclors explain it.
First, Bodin makes ir clear again and again that not all interlocutors are willing
to distance themselves from their faith. Salomon states this, as we have seen,
openly; Coronaeus no less?' and even if Fridericus and Cuflius do not say it
explicitly, one feels that the same applies to them. Toralba is the only one who
claims expliciliy that he is willing to be convinced by better arguments-adding,
of course, that i t would be a mark of folly to agree too quickly with other peo-
ple.sg Second, the interlocutors commit again and again fallacies and circles-
Bodin wants to show his intelligent readers how difficult it indeed is to avoid
circularities in dealing with religious matters.& The aggressiveness with which
his interlocutors son~etirnescIairn that the other's religion does not even merit
refutationb' and praise their own belongs to this context. Third and last, Bcdin
seems to have doubts with regard to the capaciry of human reason to settle the
questions a1 stake. Often enough, not only the Old Testament (including Deu-
taoisaiah)," bul even the same facts can be in~erpretedin different ways-the
suffering of the Jewish people can be seen as punishment or as Je-
sus' forgiving of sins as a mark of divinity or as a sign d detestable a r r o g a n ~ e . ~
It is not clear to me whether B d j n accepts reason as a last standard or sees in
the assumption of this standard, tm, a form of circularity. Toralba prefers argu-
ments to authorities. which would not be accepted, for example, by Epicure-
, ~ Fridericus goes even as far as to say
' Curtius defends f i d e i ~ r n and
a n ~ , ~but
that certain contradictions are only perceived by people without a pure heartb7
and that God is incomprehensible by rea~on."~ Even if i t is clear thar with such
slatemenis the Proteslants immunize thenlselves against any criticism, this does
not yet entail that Bodin shares Toralba's rationaIis1 optimism; he is at least fas-
cinated by Senamus's skepticism.
Abelard, Llull, and Cusanus, on the other hand, share a common faith in
reason. The three of them believe in a possible agreement between religions and
know very well ~ h a rsuch an agreemen1 can be achieved only on the basis of
reason. The main difference between h e i r works and Bodin's dialogue in my
eyes consists not in the facl thar a "deism" committed to reason alone in the six-
teenth century had become a full-fledged alternative la religions based on revt-
lation; for the philosopher in Abelard comes dose to the position of deism, and
so do& the unnamed wise man who develops the common basis of all three
monotheistic religions in the first book of LluIl's Uibre. Still. probably Abelxd
and certainly Llull believe chat a rarional religion is not an alternaLive to Christi-
ani~y-christianity for them is rhe rational religion, at least insofa as rhe ra-
tional religion is willing to render explicit what is implied in it. 11 is not an acci-
dent that h e main speaker of the first book of Llull's work at the same time
belongs to one of the monotheistic religions-he could never have grasped the
lhoughr that the rational religion could be true and all the historical religions
false. In Cusanus the situation is somehow diffeient, because, as we have seen,
the frame of Ihe book already presupposes a Christian setting; still the bulk of
the arguments used by h e Word, Peter and Paul are based on reason. Scripture
is almost absent in their debates-Cusanus identifies like Llull the religion of
reason with Christianity. One could say that for Abelard with limitations, and for
Llull and Cusanus completely, Christianity-interpreted in a cenain way--and
the religion of reason coincide, and this is indeed a difference from Bodin wilh
his Toralba. For Toralba is inimical to Christianity; he regards the docuine of
trinity and Christology as inconsistent theories and is not familiar with jnterpre-
tationx of them that may be compatible with reason or even follow from it.
Christianity had radically changed in the course of the sixteenth cenlury-thz
synthesis of Platonism and Catholicism that one can find also in Ficino had col-
lapsed: With the Tridentinum, Caholicism had become more antjphi~osophicrtl,
and philosophy had &come more distant from the traditional religion.
But as imporlant as it is, this is not the most relevant difference. Mare sig-
nificant is h e fact d-iar in ihe intellectual universes of Abelard, Llull. and Cusa-
nus there is no intellectual corresponding to Senamus. His presence in Bodin is
not so influential, because it increases the number of the interlucutors; il i s so
important because it endangers the project of the identificatian of one specific
historic religion, however subtly interpreted, as the religion of reason-for the
plurality of religions is then only mirrored by the plurality of reasons. This
might seem a very attractive position; but the pnce for i~ is very high--as legal
positivism is the necessary consequence of the demise of na~urallaw, so a reli-
gious authority unchallengeable hy reason must be the result of reason giving up
its position as final arbiter.
The three earlier authors, as rnenrjoned before, are more or less religjous ra-
tionalists-they think that reason is the supreme arbiter even in divine matters
and that we can come through reason alone lo decide what the m e religion is;
faith and authorilies are subordinated to reason. 11 is hard lo see how otherwise
an in~erreligiousdialogue could be possibk--each side wouId appeal to its own
fairh, and rhe dialogue would fa11as it dws in Bodin. AH three authors are aware
of the fact that religious habits and aaditinns are extremely important and that
people are unwilling to shed them off; still, they insist that [hey are able, and
more: lhar they ought to do so. when they are convinced by reason. Abelard's
philosopher comptains:
 Inlemligious DiaIogues during the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 71

']*here IS a love naturally present within all peopie for their own race and for
thole with whom they are brought up, which makes them shrink with honor
from anythlng which is said against their faith; and,turning what [hey have be-
come accustomed to into part of their nature, as adults they doggedly hold
whatever they learnt as children, and before they are able to grasp the things
that are said, they affirm that they believe them. . . . For it is amazing that . . .
about cdith . . . there is no progress. bu! rather Ihe leaders of society and ordi-
nary folk, peasants and the educaled are considered to have the very same
views, and the person who is said to be strongest in faith is the one who does
not go beyond the common understancting ofpeople.m

Certainly the philosopher is not identical with Abelard, whose epistemologjcal

position does not appear to be completely rationalistic-at least in some of his
other books. Tn the Collationes, however, the Christian does not really contradict
the philosopher's rationalistic creed: "We do not yidd to their (i-e., of the phi-
losophers who conxJertedto Christianity) authority in the sense that we fail to
discuss rat~ondlywhat they have said before we accept it. Otherwise we wvuld
cease lo be philosophers--that is to say, if we put aside rational enquiy and
made greal use of arguments from For the Christian objects only
that terrain things may appear rational, even if they are not:' and his is not de-
nied by the philosopher who only adds that also authorities e n and that rhere are
authorities contradicting each other so that it is reason that must determine what
an authority is. The Christian replies that "none of our writers who has good
judgment prohibits the faith from being investigated and discussed by argument,
nor is i t reasonable to accept what is doubtful, unless the reason why it should be
accepted is first And he recognizes rhar the discussion with a per-
son who does not accept the aulhority of Holy Scripture can be done only on the
basis of reason. "No one can be countered except on the basis of what he agrees
to; he will not be convinced save through what he accepts. . . . I know that what
Gregory and our other learned writers, what even Christ himself and Moses de-
clare, is irrelevant to you: rheir pronouncements will not compel faith in you."7"
However, when Abaelardus at the beginning had said that the fact that the phi-
losopher was no1 obliged to defend any authority made his position easier in the
debale. since he could he attacked less, he had added that he therefore should not
consider i~ anything great if he appeared to be the strongest in the deba~e.~' The
commitment to an authority may be a burden, but if i t proves possible to defend
Ihis authority, as the Christian succeeds in doing, the intellectual achievement i s
the more impressive. Later the Jew inverts the argument: The Christian is fa-
vored by being armed with two horns-the two testaments-instead of one?
Llull i s certainly the most rationalistic of the three-he usually opposes
faith to reason in the same way as Plato had opposed arthr do.ra to ~ ~ i s t e m e , ' ~
and he does not know the subtle difference between rdno and iniellectus rhat
characterizes Cusanus's epistemology (even if, probably for pedagogical rea-
sons, il does not play a role in De pocejidei). In his dialogue, already before the
appearance of rhc genlile. the three wise men had decided to aim at one religion
corresponding to the one God and thus to discuss their faiths according to the
methodological principles taught them by Lady InteIIigence; for since they could
not agree on appealing to authorities, they would have to use necessary rea-
sons.77 Aria the conversion of Lhe gentile, one wise man proposes t h a ~one
should reassume the earlier task, but another objects that humans are so rooted
in the faih to which they and their ancestors belong that i t would be impossible
to change their religious opinions through disputations; they despise argumenb
aiming at shaking their faith and say that they want to live and dic in the faith of
their parents. But the first wise man jnsias that it belongs to the nature of truth
to be more strongly rooted in the soul than falsehood; and he avers that \here is a
religious duty to try to find out what *e truth regarding God is. So they agree on
hour. place, and method. both of dealing with each other and of arguing, for
their next An expression of Llull's rationalism is that the three wise
men don't even wan! to know how the gentile chose, since this could endanger
the reliance on reason alone of (heir dhcussion.'$ What counts for them is not
which religion rht: gentile chose, but which religion he ought to have chosen.
Still, Llull does not at all deny the emotional aspects of a conversion, which on
the contrary are depicted very well-the gentile weeps both after his conversion
to monotheism in general and after his conversion to one of the three monotheis-
tic religions.80Llull speaks in this context also about grace and enlightcnment-
but divine grace is effused when a person is enabled by reason to grasp and in-
ternalize salviftc truths.
Cusanus's view on the historically realized religions i s even more realistic
than Abelard's and Llull's. In the intrductory dialogue before God an archangel
describes the human condition as such that most people are obliged to work hard
and to obey the political power. They do not have the possibility to think for
ihernselves, and therefore God sent them prophets to instruct them. But the peo-
ple did no1 think to hear the prophets, hut in them God himself; jn general, hu-
' central idea of Cusanus is to
man nature tends to regard habit as t r ~ r h . ~The
show that all religions partake, albeit in different degrees, in the one true relig-
ion; they have different rites, that should be kept in their difference, for the de-
sire for too much homogeneity i s an obstacle to peace82and diversity may well
increase devotion,83
In fact this is a great difference between LIull and Cusanus: Llull wants lo
convert everybody to Ihe Catholic Church, because he harbors no doubt lhat all
non-Catholics will be damned, while Cusanus seems to accept a plurality of re-
ligions with their different rites and customs, as long as they accepl the basic
tenets of a Platonic form of Chrislianity. If the contents of the various religions
are rightly interpreted, they do nut really conrradicr each other. Cusanus seem
to grant t h a ~Christianity, too. has to be interpreted in a right way; there are
wrong interpretations of the doctrine of the triniry, and Cusanus himself dislikes
the mislead~ngternis Father, Son, and Huly piti it.'^ Cusanus's approach is
clearly inclusivisr-in every religion there are hints of the religious truths re-
vealed in Christianity. since the basic tenels of Christianity are implied ]in every
For a radical metaphys~calmonist as Cusanus, an exclusivis~,neces-
>- ,
,
p, Interreligious Dialogues during the Middle Ages and Early Modemiry 73
-,
T c

*
h
sarjly dualist posit~oncannot be acceptable; somehow he must share the convic-
tion of Abelard that there 1s no doctrine so false that it does not contain some
UUth.86Without doubt. inclusivism has certain paternalistic traj ts-i t presup-
poses that the interpreter has the suprior stance and that he is able to understand
'iherepresentative of other traditions better than they do themselves. When Cu-
sanus writes in his sermon CXXVT that every Jew beiieves in Chnst, whether he
wants i t or not,87one thinks of Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christiansw-and of
'the rage it provoked among non-~bnstians.'~
When Abclaml, Llull, Cusanus, and Bodin (in rhe character of Toralba) op-
60% reasons to authorities, what do they mean by "reason"? On the one hand,
both Abelard's philosopher and Twalba oppose natural law and natural religion
the law and religion based on revelation and demanding the fulfillment of
iites that cannot be deduced from reason as, for example, drcumcision. It is
'characteristicLhat none of them appeals to pure reason alone, as Kant would do;
boh accepr the biblical narrative and identily their position with the religion of
he palrlarchs b e f ~ r eMoses.

11 1s clear that before the actual giving of the Iaw and the observances of the
sacramem laid down by law there were many people who made do allh natu-
i ral law. w h ~ hconsists in loving God and one's neighbor, who cultivated JUS-
lice and lived hves wh~chwere most acceptable to God, for example, Abel.
: Noah and his children, and also Abraham, Lot, and Melchlsedech, uhom even
your l a m records and greatly commends

Similarly, Toraiba says:

,,-
,,,

I only conclude that Adam and his son Abel had been instructed in the best re-
, ligion, and after them Seth, Enoch, Evfethusaleh up to Noah who worshipped in
great holiness, to the exclus~onof all others. that eternal and only me God, the
Builder and Parent of ail things and rhe gear Architect of the whole world.
Therefore I believe this religion i s not only the oldest but also the best of alLw

A According to Twalba, law of nature and natural religion (naturae [ex er naru-
'raiis religio) are sucfrcient for attaining salvation so that the Mosaic rites are no1
necessary.g' Even in his defense of the decatogue Toralba gives a "natural" 'usd-
:fi~alion-he Ten Commandments correspond to the ten celestial orbsg' Nor
'revelation, but cosmotheology grounds morals.
:' BUI !he opposition to authoriiy and factual riles does not ye1 clarify what
'reason is and how it proceeds. Our authors have quite different concept5 of rea-
son. Abclard's dialogue differs from the others, because 11 does no[ cunfront the
Jew wilh thc Christian, but the philosopher with both of them; and the second
coliatio deals almost completely with questions of eth~cs(includ~ogthe meta-
c serhics and the theodicy problem), ignoring the docuines of rnnity and
' ~ h ~ s i of
%carnation. The starting point o f this coilario is Ihe human desire for happiness;
,"thedefinition of "good" and the determination of the highest g o d are the main
:subjects of the debate. The horizon of the debate is thus what Kant would call
74 Vittorio Htlsle

"ehicothmlogy."AS the Christian fays: "You usually call i t '&&its,'that is

'morals,' and we 'divinity.' We cat1 it thus hecause of what it aims to grasp-
G d ;you name it from that through which the journey there is made-good be-
' ~ ~ central idea is that ethics can be dab&
haviour. which you call ' v i ~ . t u ~ . " The
rated convincingly o d y if including an eschatoIogcal dimension. In this pro-
cess, however. the Christian rejects popular ideas about heaven and hell as
places. God is not local, also heaven and hell should not be inierpreled so either;
In general the hibIical assertions abour hell should nor be understocd literally."
While Abelard defends Christ's physical ascension, he insists that i l was done
only to strengrhcn our faith, not to increase Christ's glory. and that in any case
the statements about Christ being seared at the right band of the Farher are only
mcraphoIic.%
IF AbeIard's dialogue can be called "ethicotheologica1,"Llull's dialogue is
certainly "ontorheoIogica1": The baqis of all his arguments, many of which are
repetitive, is the ontologica1 proof.46 This is an a priori proof. and such a prmf is
needed by Llull if he wants to rely on reason alone. As in Anselm, the ontologi-
cal proof is interprctad in its axiulugical vanant: Ciad has all perfections, and
that relig~onhas to be regarded as true that ascribes to God the greatest perfec-
l i ~ n Having
. done it elsewhere, I do not want to analy~ehere in d e ~ i Llull's
l
arguments why the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation tollow from divine per-
fection--even those who rejecl them will probably agree with h e comparative
statement that they beIong to the bcst orgurnents developed for the specifically
Christian dogmas. They have profoundly influenced Cusanus. What Cusanus
adds in Depacefidei, however, is a transcendental reflection alien to Lull.
The whoIe dialogue starts by reflecting on what is already presupposed by
the philowphers gathered in the heaven of reason. It is wisdom, the object of
their search. But there can be only one wisdom; if there were many, they had tu
partake in the one. for unity antecedes plurality. This wisdom is the divine Lo-
gos, which cannot be different from God. "See how you philosophers of various
sects agree on thc rcligion of une God-whom you all presuppose, in that you
profess to be lovers of Already in Abelard, the Christian had seen in
the Logos h e bridge from he philosopher's posilion to ~hri#ianii~;~"bu~his
was an isolated remark, while i t i s Cusanus's am to deduce the main features of
rhe true religion from the concep! of Logos. Trinity is interpreted as the inner
structure of this Logos-.it h s nothing to do with ~ulytheism.wh~chIn fact pre-
supposes the One God rn the same way as the cult of the saints presupposes the
. ~ infinite, God i s neither one n o r three: the trinity can hmr be
One. ~ a i i - t t As
grasped with the concepts of uni~y.equalily, and connection.lDDLike ~ u l 1 , ' O '
Cusanus sees furthermore in the triadic structure of the creatures an allusion lo
the divine
It is irnporlanc that Cusanus agrees with Jews and Muslims [hat the trinity
that they deny indeed has to be denied; but rightly understmd, the trinity is irn-
plied by them.'" Fw Inure clumsy is the argument for incanxion, as developed
by Peter, i t is less satisfying than w'hat we find in other works of Cusanus, as the
rhird book of De docra rgooranria where Christ has rhe function To r n e d i a i ~he-
 lntwreligious Dialogues during the MiddIe Ages and Early Modernity 75

tween God and the univme. The central idea in De pacefidei seems to be that
human nature can achieve immortality only by union with divine naturelw and
that this presupposes that one person has a wisdom that could not be greater;
such a person would then be at the same lime human and divine.'" Cusanus
defends against the Muslims the necessity-nor the mere historical facluality-
of Christ's death; through such a death he is more perfect than he would be
~ j h it.lM ~ ~ It ist irnporlan~h a t such axiological arguments for the Incarnation
do not yet defermine the question whether the historical Jesus is the incarnate
God. Already ~ l u l l ' ~has' a clear awareness that these are two distinct questions,
and it is easy to see that the second querlion is far more difficult to settle than
the first: Even if we had apodictic arguments for the necessity of Incarnation,
this would not yet show that Jesus is the Christ. Cusanus's theory seems to entail
fiat God incarnate was omniscient-how could one ever prove that Jesus was?
Ethical questions play [he dominant role in Abelard, a minor one in Llull. In
Cusanus they appear only at the end of the work, when !he nature of human
happiness is discussed. Remarkable is the discussion of the Koranic paradise
that so often has been criricized by Christians; like ~ 1 ~ 1 1 Cusanus
, ' ~ ~ mentions
that it could be interpreted in a nonliteral sense, and that this has indeed been
done by Islamic philosophers like ~ v j c e n n a . "Remarkable
~ is Peter's syn~pathy
for Muhammud's difficult task: To overcome the tradirional polytheism, the
prophet had to entice them by sensual pr~rnises."~ The discussion of the sacra-
ments is inidated by a Tartar who says bluntly how awkward the Eucharist
seems from his point of view-namely, as a form of theophagY.'"Peter is re-
placed by Paul as discussion leader, who develops a theory of rhe justification
through faith lhar has often been compared with Luther's. Cusanus, however,
insists that a faith without works is dead and that the works demanded by God
are the same for a11 peopte. OUTmoral duties are not mandated to us in a heter-
onomous way by different prophets including Jesus-the light ihat shows them
to us i s created together with our soul.

The divine commandments are very terse and very well known to everyone and
are common to all nations. Indeed, the lighr that shuws us these commandmtnts
are created together wirh the rational soul. For God speaks within us. com-
manding us to love Him from whom we receive being and not to do unto an-
other anything except that which we want done unlo us. Therefore, love is the
fulf Hment of God's law, and all other laws are reducible lo the Iaw of love.'12

The material content of the law of God is thus similar to what we found de-
fended by hbelard's philosopher and Toralba. Aqd the sacraments? Cusanus
reduces their importance radically: What counts is not the sign. but what is sig-
nified by it."' circumcision does not save, but ought nor to be forbidden ei-
ther,Ii4and even without Eucharist salvation is p s s i hle. 'I5 Neither Abelard nor
LLull nor Bodin's post-Tridencine Coronaeus would have been able to agree with
h i s radical doctrine of rhe sacraments of the fifteen th-century cardinal.
What can we learn from these diaIogues? Allow me to sum up my analysis
the following seven points.
First, the range of possibilities of dealing with each other sketched by o
authors is remarkably broad. From the humiliation of the other to the sincc
desire to learn from each other €0 the respect of the person end religion of t
other despile the conviction that he is wrong, our authors show us almost ever
thing that in our time as well as in theirs occurs in human interactions dealj~
wilh reIigious questions. I t is clear from what they show us that a symmetric
reIaljon is, ceteris paribus, ktter than an asymmetrical one, that an inlerreligjo
dialogue mua take place in a neurral arena, that freedom of speech must
guaranteed, even if everybody is well advised to avoid hurting remarks, tI.
procedural rules are indispensable and that one has not the right lo expect frc:
the other that he give up clr correct his religion if one is not willing to do t
same. The conviction that the members of the other religion are damned if th
do not convert to one's own is, as LIull shows, cornpalible with politeness, t
poisons the openness of the exchange at least in the long run-Llull hirns~
developed obsessive traits in his Iater life, even if his wrath was more direct
agains; his indifferent fellow Christians than against the Muslims whom he p
ied."6
Second, such a dialogue is possible only if the interlocutors know much a
are willing lo learn more about the other religions. AbeIard is the most ignor;
of our four authors-he mentions only the Sew, and what he ascribes to h.
does not correspond to what contemporary Jews rhought abouk tbemsefvt
Llull's knowledge d the Jewish religion is not very pmfound either; howev.
his knowledge of lsIm was exceptiunal not only for his time. Suffice i r to me
tjon that he spoke fluent Arabic and that possibly he wrote the Llibre del genri
deis Ires savis first in ~rabic."' Cusanus did not know Arabic, but he studi
the Koran thoroughly, as his Cribratio Alkorani demonstrares. and he includ
in his dialogue far more inlerlocutors than any interreligious author before hi
among them also polytheists. Bodin's range i s limited to monotheists, bur due
the Reformarion he adds the interdenonlinational debate to the irm-religio~
His knowledge about the differen1 religious traditions i s highly impressive. a
he seems utterly fair to each of them. Of course, none of our authors is famil
with the very diffemt type of religiosi~yrepresented by the East Asian religic
as Confucianism and Buddhism; they became seriously known ro the West or
in the seventeenth and the nineteenth century respectively, and they indeed ch
lenged the monotheistic cnnscnsus: Suffice i t 10 mention Schopenhauer.
Third,we have seen that Llull and Cusanus are aware of different traditic
and interpre~ationswithin the other religions--no religion is a m~nolithicur
Third. i t is mora1Iy imperative to try to find the best tradition and ro give a cha
[able inrerpretation of it--at least if one desires ro have one's own tmdiij
trealed with an analogous respect. In his Cribratio Alkorani, by no means a f
wnrk ~ I I E ~ T I I I Pr l C P F t h r~~ n "nia
n intrrnwrnrin "'Ik nnrl P V P ~if he ascribes i!
 Inteidigious Dialogues during the Middle Ages and Early Mudernit); '77

h e Muslims, Hopkins has made i t plausible that Cusanus "meant sornelhing

3kjn to chatimblc consmal,""' aha because he distinguishes between Muham-
mad'~and the Koran's intent. As Cusanus praised Avicenna, so today we must
rnmjnd the Mwiims of their ~ w nadi if inn of rationalisric theology--cvcn if i t i s
a fact that has to be taken into account that such a tradition is no longer ah-te
among the masses.
Fuur,th, ow has ru recognize that also in me's own religion there are im-
honai, superstiuous, and even morally path~logjcaltradihorrs. TDoverlook *em
p ~ dto point only at rhe questionable traits of thc other religions is manifestly
unfair. Far more important than a conversiun of others to one's religion is the
conversiun of onexif Lo a spiitud interprdation o f one's own religion. Cus-dnus
subtly reinterprets his own tradition, and even if his concept of Christianity is
not louched by many of ToraIba's attacks, the problem of a consistent interpreta-
tion d Christ~lngyrerr~air~s a taunring task. Cusanus himself knew that it was far
easier to agree on the doctrine of Trinity than on the Chis~ologicaldogmas.'20
The Chalcedonian formula scems inconsistent to many who havc thought about
it; and the historic31 approach to Jesus has deslroyed many of the aadiuonal
evidences of Christology. Still, the idea of a necessary mediation between G d
and the world rz~nainsa profound o m , and on its reinterpretation in a way that is
b l h logically consistent and compatible wilh the historical facls Lhe future of
Christianity may wet1 depend
F#h, besides the dogmalic the ethical dimension of reIigions must not be
neglectd. The sublimity of the Gospel's ethics remains a mark of the divine,
~ ' us anus"^ were willing
and one can eadly understand t h a ~neither U U I I ' nor
to regard rhe lslamrc polygyny as of equal value with Christian monogamy, An
ethicotheological recons~uctionof religion, as pruposed by Abelard and elabc-
xared by Kanl, musr be, if nor the core, a centrd element of any religion of rea-
son. The fulfillment of the rn~rallaw musi enjoy a higher status than thc celc-
bration of religious rites, even if that anthropology errs that does no1 recognize
the need of external symbols for internal moral principles-all of Bodic's char-
acters sing togttbe~hymns to Ciod.'13
Sixth, the failure o f Bdin's dialogue shows us that the continuation of an
jnterreligious exchange can he expected only if there i s a common gruund, and
this can hardly be anything other than reason. The deshction of reason will not
enhance the inrerreligious dialogue--on the contrary, as the history of Islam
shows. Senamus's skeplical philosophy must paralyze any meaningful i n k -
religious exchange. A rationalist foundationalism dm not at all lead to funda-
rnmtalism; nn the conlrary, il i s thc slrongcst i~~telltrcmalbulwark against it.
Fideism is the natural reaction when people bepn to despair regarding reason;
and when they embrace modem hemeneutics. fiddsm may lead ro fundamental-
ism (a thoroughly modern phenomenan).
Seventh. the main problem of tk program sketched here is, of course, its
elitist choracler.None of our authors has an illusion about it-their inrrrlocutms
are philosophically Or theologicatly !rained. and they know that their logical.
hermeneulicd, and historical knowledge [ran be found only in a f c ~ After .
Toralba's Iasr contribution Salomun remarks: "If we were like those h e r e . we
would jleed I.IU rites or ceremonies. However, il i s hardly possible and even im-
possible for the common people and the untutored masses Lo be restrained by a
simple assent of true religion wilhout rites and cererncnies."13 The inteIIectual
aristmratism of ntlr authors is hardly compatible with the democratic aspiraliuns
that lie at the basis of modern nationalisms and contemporary fundamentalisms.
People need institutions, and these are jealous of each other. As h e wars be-
rween Christian nations teach us. it would be funhermore naive to assume that
even jf a religious unity could be achieved, human aggression would aop. 1s
there any way to reformulate the idea of the search, based on dialogue and ra-
~ionalarguments, for a common religion so khal i t may be aruaclive also f ~ ther
twenty-first century? I will no1 venrure to answer this question but limit myself
to the concluding remark that the human prmpect would look better than it does
if a fucctionai equivalent to it could indeed be found.

Notes
1 . lokannes HBsle. Vor oiler h i t . Geschichte silner Kindheit (Munchen: DTV,
20Hl); Johannes Hilsle, Und wns wird jetzr? Geschichte einer Jugend {Miinchen: C H.
Beck, 2002).
2. A good overview about the contempomy discussio~~, and a crilicisrn of the popu-
lar trichotomy of theologies of retieon, can be found {n: R. SdKnk, "Watabke Ambigu-
iry: Paradigms of Truth as a Measure of the Differences among Christian Theologies of
Religion," Jahrbuch fir Philasophie des I;orschungsinsriturs f i Philosophie Han~nver
1 I (2000):53-85,
3. See my anide "PhiIosophy add the Interpre~tionof the Bible," Internationale
ZritschriJtfir Philosophie 2 (1 999): 18 1-210.
4. My iporance of Arahc forces me to ignore all analogous works written by non-
Christians, as Halevi's Kuzari,
5. F. Dominguez. "Der Religionsd~al~g bei Raimllndus Lullus." G e s p r i c h ~lesen.
Plrilosopkische Dialoge im Mittelalter, ed. K . Jacobi (Tiibingen: Narr, i999), 263-290,
266.
5. See E. Colorner. N k o h u vorr Kves und Raimund Llu!I (Berlin: NP. 196 1 ), 1 15.
(Even if Llull's Llibre del gentil e deis tres savis is not found, either in Catalan or Latin.
in Cusanus's library3 On Cusanus's study of Abelard see R- Haubst, "Marginalien des
Nikolaus van Kucs zu A b a t l ~ d , "P e r m Abaeiardm, ed. K. 'rhomas (Trier: Paulinus
Verlag, 1980). 287-246.(Cusanus's marginal notes. however, do not demonstrate any
knowledge of the Collariones.) Specifically on lhe relations between Llull and Cusanus in
interreiigious matters see W.A. Euier. Unitas er pax. Reliponswrgleich bei Raimmdu~
Ilrllus und Niknlous voti Kues (Wilrzbur~:NP. 199Q)and E.Cdomer, Nikolous von Kucs
( ? 1464) und Ramm Llull ( f 1316): rhre Bcgegnung mir d m nrchtchristlich~nReligbnen
(Ttier; NP. 1995).
7. See P, von Moos. "AbacIaTd: Colhzione~."Hrri~phcerkeder Plulomphir. Mlt~elaL
, K. Flasch (Stut~gart:Reclam Verlag. 1998)- 129- 150. 131. He ex;ludes t h ~ spos-
~ c red.
s~bilitytoo quickly. Abelard was fascina~edby ~slm'sreligious tolerance; when he con-
sidered lo emigrate to e Muslim counrty (Hirrario caiamira:um h2). he probably had
knowlctlge of rhe rationnlisrs among thc Muslims.
 Interreligious Dialogues during the Middle Agcs and Early Modernity 79

8. On the multiple variations of the genre see my essay "Interpreting Philosvh~cal

~ i a ] ~ g l J eAntike
~ . * ' und Abetidland 48 (2002): 68-90.
9. See H. Westennann, "Wahrheitssuche irn Streilgspriich. Uberlegungcn zu Peler
~baeiards'Dialogus inter Philosophum, ludaeum et Christianum,"' Grsprhche lesen.
157-197, 166f. I owe much to this splendid article.
10. See rhe excellent "Introduction" in: Perer Abelard, Cullufiones,ed. and trans. J.
M a ~ n h and n G. Oriandi (Oxford: Oxford Unjversily Press. 2001). xvii-ch, livf. I quote
abelad according to this edition and translation, giving first the paragraph number and
then he page number, so lhar the users of other edi~ionsmay easily find rhe passage.
11. On the date of the Coilariones see Westcrmann. 157Tf as well as Marenbon. "In.
tduction," xxviiff.
12. It was first proposed by C. Mews, "On Dating the Works of Peler Abelard." Ar-
chive~d'hisfoire doctrimale e! Iittiraire du moyen Bge 52 ( I 985): 71-1 34. See also 1.
jo]ivet. La Thiologie dAbPlard (Paris: M.Arnold, 1997), 88ff:K. Jacobi. "Einleirung,"
~espruchelesen, 9-22,20.
13. M. McCord Adams, "Introduction," in: P e ~ Abelard.r Erhicai Wriringr, lrans. P.
V. Spade (lndianapolis/Cmbridge; Hackett Publishing Cornpmy, 1995). xiii.
14. Marenbon, "Introduction," Ixxxviii.
IS. Jacobi, "Einleitung," 12.
Ih. Bodin, d course, was never a Jew--even if his rnalemal ancestors may have
been-. "but rather a profound Judaiser who had a spiritual kinship with the Jews which
was rooted in a shared prophetic monotheism" fP. L. Rose. Bodin and rhe Greol God o j
Narure, [Genkve: NP, 19801, 191).
17. J. Bodin, Colloquium of !he Seven Secre~sof rhe Sublime, trans. M. L. B. Kunrz,
(Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973, 145. Since the only complete edition
of the Latin original ever i s from IS57 (by L. Noack; reprinl Sruttgart-Bad: Cannstatt,
1966) and Kuntz consulted for her translation manuscripts unknown to Noack, her trans-
lation, which contains many critical notes on the text, is also a contribution to the text-
till hopefully a new edition of this very important work can be made that Crotius. Queen
Christina of Sweden, Bayle, Conring, Thornasius and Leibniz still had to read as manu-
script. (In 1720. a printing of the book had already begun in Leipzig, but it was stopped
by the authorities.) i give also the passages in Noack's edition. me passage just quoted
is on p. 1 12.) On the imponance of harmony and of the new chromaticism of Renaissance
music for the Heptaplomcres see Kuntz's erudite "Introduction." xiii-lxxxi, Ixiiff.
l8. Kuntz, 148; Noack. 1 15.
19. Kuntz. 150: Noack, 1 16.
20. See Ramon Llull, LIihre del gentif e dels rres sovis. ed. Antoni Bonner (Palma de
Mallorca: NP. 1993). 207. For mosr readers ir will k easier to look up the Latin transla.
tion Liber de gentiii et mribw sapienribrcr. which was done still during Uull's life: for
chat one has st111 to consult the famous Mopuntina. i.e.. the eighteenth-century edition of
Llull's Larin works. since the work has not yet a p p e d in the new critical edition. See
Raymundus Lullus, Opera, Tomus I1 (Mainz: NP, 1?22: reprint Frankfurt: NP, 1965f,2 1 -
1 14; [here i 13. (1 give the pages of rhe reprinr, r~otof rhe orip~natedition.) A complete
English transtation by A. Bunner can be found in the iirst of the rwo volumes of: Ramon
Llull. S e k r ~ e dW U Ir;r (Princeton. N I.: Princeton Clnivensity Press. 1985). an abridged
version in the later reader: Doctor iiliuninarus: A Rajnon Llu1I Reader. ed. and trans. A.
Bonner (Princeton. N.J.:Prince~onIniversir y Press. 1 993).
2 1 . Nicola~de Cusa. De ~ a c e f i d ezurn
i epistula ad lut~nnrmrir Segobia. ed. R. Kti-
bansky and H. Bascour {Hnmbuv: NP. 19591, ? (Ch. I ). The most recenr English transla-
tion nf [he mork i s De ~ a c e . f i d ~0n.d
1 Cnh~ntio Alhor-ani. tnns. J. Hopkins (Minneapoiis:
80 Vittorio Hrjsle

Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990). See jn the letter to John of Segovia the appeal against
war and for a spirirual exchange: 97,100.
22. Kuntz, 3; Noack, I.
23. Kuntz, 467ff; Noack, 355ff.
24. Ltibre, 16U, 180; Liber 93, 102. See the agreement Llibre 461Liber 41, an agree-
ment that is supposed to avoid the arousal of antipathy.
25. Llibre, 13, 14. 207, 208; Libtr, 25,26, 113, 114.
26. Wibre, 46; Liber, 41.
27. Wibre,198; Liber, 109.
28. Liibre, 205; Liber, 1 13.
29. Llibre, 208;Liber, 1 14.
30. Coilationes, 8 147, 1 57.
31. See the self-deprecatory remarks of the Jew. Collutioncs, § IOf, 13 and 8 ISf,
19ff.
32. Collationes $ 63,8 1 .
33. 5 69. 87. Bodin's Senamus, who, tm, has anti-Judaic inclinations (Kuntz. 152f.
206; Noack, 118, 159), calls all uncultivated people "animals" (Kuntz, M2; Nonck, 336).
34. Llibre, 67; Liber, 51.
35. Ch. XII, 39. On the anti-Judaism in Cusanus's own ecclesiastical policy see K
Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues. Gcschichie einer Entwicklung (FrankfudMain: Klostenann
1998), 35Of. I owe much information to this book.
36. He is called "digiosissimus"by Senamus (Kuntz, 465; Noack, 354).
37. Kunrz, 438; Noack, 333.
38. Kuntz, 254; Noack, 194.
39. Kuntz. 241 ;Noack, 184.
40.Kuntz, 434; Noack, 330.
41. Kuntz, 420; Noack, 319: After Curtius has mentioned Christian church fathers
Octavius quotes Muslim authorities Fridericus's reaction is: "Non video cur theologorun
christianorum clarissima lumina cum ista Mahurnmedanontm fece debeanr comparari.'
See his analogous comment on the Tdmud in Kuntz, 354; Noack, 269.
42. Kuntz, 233; Noack, 178. Fridericus i s called by the narrator in this context ironi
cally and benevolently "homo rninime malus."
43. Kuntz, 467f: Noack, 355f.
44. Kuntz. 47 1 ; Noack, 358.
45.Kuntz, 143; Noack, l l I.
46. Kuntz, 162f; Noack, 124.
47. Kuntz, 29ff, 74ff; Noack, 21ff. 59ff.
48. Kuntz, 165; Noack, 126. See also Kuntz, 422; Noack, 320f.
49. Kuntz, 163; Noack,127.
50. Kuntz. 208; Noack, 160.
51. Kuntz,169; Noack, 129f.
52. Kuntz, 170; Noack, 13 1.
53. Kunrz. 171 ; Noack, 131. I assume that B d i n refers mainly to Ch. XI11 and XV
of De pocefidei. even if the edi~orsof Cusanus's work write in their erudite "praefario"
"Guillelmus Postellus nec non Ioannes Bodinus in opribus Cusani versabantur: quorur
etsi neuter ipsum laudat Re poce fidei, tarnen utrumque hunc quoque librum copnoviss
haud absonum videtur," xliii.
54. Kuntz. 330ff: Noack. 252ff.
55. Kuntz, 471: Noack. 358.
56.Llibt-e. 209; Libel-. 1 14.
 1nterTeligio~sDialogues during the Middle Ages and Early Mude~~lity 81
$.3q .'
,$; 57. See G. Gawlick, "Der Deismus irn Calloquirrm Heproplomeres," Jean Bodins
kblIoquilun He,~aplorneres.ed. G. Gawlick and F. Niewohner {Wicbarlerl: NP, 1996),
e-26,Zjt': "Von den Siebn wird keiner m einern Glaubenswechsel oder gar zum Auss-
Bur der Offenbmngsdigion bewegt, und avch vom Lerer w i d weder dar eine. nech
@&% andere erwutet. Keine Religion rrweist sicn aLs starker denn die aliderc. und sclbst
;Aazr, , Deismas, der den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner ailer Religionen enthalt, is1 und
F.Y%, '

?i$kibr nur cine unter mehreren Oprior~en-So h a t denn das CoIl~lquiumm.E. nicht den
&,:
,,,:--> -
. .wsmus rum Ergebnis, sondem etwas anderes, vie1 Bescheideneres: Gespfivh51eilnet1-
$+,er "nd Lesar hleikn bei der Religion, mir clef sie ins Gcspech bzw. in die Lrkliire
gijiLgctleten sind, nun aber mit veriindedem, emei~ertem8ewuBtsein.-Das scheinr nicht
;, vjel zu sein; es ist a k r auch nicht so wenig, da8 man sagen mufire, das CuiIoquium
r,,.khr
Qdhne
.J-+
nicht die Miihe intensive" Studiums."
I
- , 58. Klmtz, 205,425; Nnack I SX, 33 1.
- : 59. Kuntz, 327; Noack. 249.
, a.
See Kuntz, 268,277,242, 383;Noack7,05,21?.
{F
&: 1,
.. 61. Kuntz, 22 I , 266; Noack 169.20Li.
62. Kuntz, 384; Noack. 290.
~r!:: ,
.p: 63. Kuntz, 262; Noack, 200f. Abclard, Collariones. 5 15, 19ff: LLibre. 69:Liber, 52.
64.Kurlu, 3 10. See also the criticism of auricl~larcnnfessian, Kunrz. 39 1 ; Noack,
?
g395.
4,
..,, :, 63. Kuntz. 171.252, 394,397.339,421.460: Noack, 132, 19J, 297F, 300.302, 319,
4f5350.
,<<+,A

, -,:
1 .
+, 6>' f6. Kuntz, 252,354; Noack 193,269f.
-A+'-
:.-+
%%?,
,67.Kuntz, 298; Koack. 228.
, .,,
, , 68. Kuntz, 359; Noack, 273. See dsu Kuntz, 396: Noack. 299. Interesting are dcn
%-,:?his remarks, Kuntz, 463;Noack, 352.
69.97f.gif.
gl-';, 70.5 70,89.
71. 9 72,93.
' 72. 4 77.97,
:$'
.'bt 73. 5 78.99.
74.3 3,7.
75. 8 10. 13.
76.See my ioterprerati~nof Llull's philosophy in my "Einfirhrvng." Raimurrdu~Lul-
%a-.
,I-.
yr-. l ~ Die . nncue h g i k . Logica nova (Hamburg: hleiner, 1985). ix-xciv.
77 I - l i h n , 12; I.ikr, 2 5 .
%>- ,
4. - 78. Llibre, 209; Liber, 1 14.
,", <. .-
-:+.y , 79. Uibre, 206; Liber, 1 !3.
illX
. t.
5.*.1.
80.Llibre, 43, 198; L h ~ r19,, 1 (H.
5 -,?! - ,
:
?6 .
81. Ch. 1; Sf.
=
,y..,
82.Ch.19;61.
;,g:j- !>
,' ,
83. Ch. 1 , 19; 7 . 6 2 .
. :.
C??, 84.Ch. 8: 25.
%$
--r"?.. :
' 85.Ch. 9;26 abut the d ~ r r i n e3r rrini~yas irnplicd by Isaiah.
. , *->... 86. Cul!ari~ncs5 5, 7 . Abelard quoier A ~ ~ g ~ ~ r(tQi nu ae e ~ ~ [ o nE~mngeliomn~
es 2.40).
$$'but. as Marenban "airs, he "is using Asgustinc'r romrneni in almost ihc opposile way to
>XI;: what .
:m ~ t sauthor intended."
87.Nicolai dc Cusa, Sennoner l j f (1452- 14.54).Fo~riclrlrtsI. Sernrones C,YXIi-CXL.
.>:ed.R Hauht nnd H. Pauli (Hambuq: NP, IYrd5). 21: .'credii tgitur. sivc velir, sive nolit.
:&'Chrisrum. . . . Er ob h ~ fides
?T
c Judaica irnplici~esernper Chris~umconrinrbar..'
 88. 1 rrray quutt: h e reaction or an East Asian student, who. when in one of m!
courses he was confronred with Rahner's podrim, said: "I am no1 sure I like the con&
scension of this anonymous Buddhist.''
89. 5 ZQ,25. See also 55 48ff, 59ff.
90. Kuntz, 1 83; Noack, 14 1 . The argument from age i s implicid y rejected by A k .
lord's ?hilosopher, when he states thar he expects to find more truth in the Christian than
in Ihe lewish religion, since the former is younger and an intellectual progress is neve
guaranteed, but still likely fC~l~ationw 5 G5, 81rf). The Muslim in Llilll seems to impjy
thar a later propher is mort authorized than an eadier one, but is confronted with the ab
jeaion tha~in this case Muhammad would have to be replaced by a ncw prophet, an&so
on:LiiSre. 1W, Liber, 95.
91. Kuaz, 186: N o x k . 143.
92. Kunu, 190; Noack, 146.
92, Colhioncs 67,93,
94. 85 161-198, 171 203.
95. 6 174f, 185ff.
96.This bec~nlespanicularly evident, Uihre, 100; fiber. 66.
97. Hopkias, 40: Ch. V. 14.
98. Cdlationt?r 71. 89.
99.Ch.6 , 16.
1CO. Ch. 8,21ff.
\ F I . f lihrr797;Liber. Mf.
1M.Ch. 8,25f.
103. Ch. 9. 27f. A similar distinction between the belief in Trinity ascribed by rhe
Muslims to the Christians and [heir real belief i s to be found in Llull. LIibre. 114f. I6Of.
Liber, 73,93 and andogously with regard to Incarnation L!ibre, 140: Liber. $1.
IN. Ch, t3. I4,40f. a.
105. Ch. 121. 3Sff.
1&. Ch. 14.44ff Again, Cusanus follows Llull. Llibrc. 140; Liber. 84.
107. Llibre, 1654 Libar, 95: Jesus' divinity is "proven" hy the success of Christian-
ity.
108. Uibre. 1% Liber, 109. R e Muslim, however, rejects his inrerpretarion as
helttic. Llull seems to suggest that there is a more intelleclual interpretation of Islam. bul
that it i s not widespread.
103. Ch. 15.48ff.
I ID. Ch. 15.49. In LlulI's I J i h r ~ ,I h2f, Liber 94 the Muslim argues that the divine
mission of Muhammad is proven by his fight against the polytheists, but the pagan rejects
this though!. Cusanus is more willing, a1 leas! in Dc pacefide, to grant a positive func-
tion. willed by God, to Muhammad.
11I.Ch. 16. SI.
1 12. Hopkins 6%; Ch. 16.25.
113. Ch. 16.51.
I 14. Ch. 16. 55f.
1 15. Ch. 18. 60f.
116. Already Llihrp. 121. 155; Liber, 76. 91 the Christian says that Christians de-
serve to be punished by G d Tor rheir misdeeds more severeIy than non-Christians. ll
spcnks fur Llult's sense VT respect fur ihe other religions that he has his Muslim make an
analogous poin~:Uibr.. 169: Liber, 97
117. That remains in my eyes a plausible interpretation of Llihre. 5 f ; fiber. 21. de-
spite the objections of A. Bonner in his "lntrducci6" to his Cstalen edition. uv-liv. xviiif.
 <?
,.w
Interreligious Did ogua during rhe Middle Ages and Early Modernity 83
A

.:' He is forcod to SAume a LluH before Uull. whom nnhody else has evzr mentioned. And
:+ Leven if he may have existed in the East, 1s ir likely that ihe autodidact Llull knew his
~ork?
1 18. Nicolai de Cusa. Cribmrio Alknrani. ed. L. Hagemann {Hamburg: NP, 19861,
125.
119. See his 'Introduction" l o his aforementioned trmslarjon. 24.
120.See the letrer to John of Segovia. 98.
121.LIibre, 196; Liber, 109.
122. De pcceJdei, Ch. 19, 61.
123. Kuntz. W. 144.3 12; Noack, 71, 1 12, 233.
124. Kuntz, 462; Noack, 352.