David Albertson, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California
"What Does Mysticism Have to Do with Geometry? Space and Interiority in Medieval Christian Thought"
Friday, September 29 at 5:00 pm in 401 Physical Sciences
Too often medieval Christian mysticism is confined to modern assumptions about religion. The soul and God alone seem unmeasurable; only the world can be measured. But this metric binary did not hold before the seventeenth century. Can we still hear in medieval mysticism a different experience of the world? By examining both female mystical visionaries and the austere mathematical theology of Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), a different kind of geometry emerges, both before and beyond quantitative measurement.
David Albertson is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford, 2014) and articles on medieval and Renaissance Christian mysticism, theology, and philosophy. Albertson’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is the Executive Director of the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought.
