Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode Title: David Albertson, "The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure Without Measure" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Date: January 27, 2026
Host: New Books (Interviewer/Colleague)
Guest: David Albertson

Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging, deeply intellectual conversation between host (a friend and fellow scholar) and Professor David Albertson about his new book, The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure Without Measure. The book explores how geometrical thinking, specifically the concept of "measure," shapes the lineage of Christian contemplation, and challenges the dominant narrative that centers mystical experience around apophatic (negative, formless) traditions. Albertson distinguishes between two key genealogies in Christian mysticism—what he calls Tradition A (formlessness, apophatic) and Tradition B (form, cataphatic)—and investigates the implications of these for theology, philosophy, and even the contemporary technological world. The discussion is personal, detailed, and at times speculative, balancing close textual analysis with big-picture questions about modernity, mathematical thinking, and the stakes of religious studies today.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Background and Motivations for the Book

• Continuation and Prequel
  Albertson’s new book serves as both a continuation and, in some respects, a prequel to his earlier Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (03:39).

  “...this second book in a way continues, if not maybe serves rather as a prequel, as I understand it, to that book...” – Interviewer (01:56)

• Shift from Arithmetic to Geometry
  While the first book focused on arithmetic and invisible number in medieval thought, this new project moves to geometry as visible measure and diagram—an exploration that proved to disrupt established scholarly narratives.
• Encounter with Plotinus
  A pivotal moment occurred during Albertson’s 2015 sabbatical while reading Plotinus, leading him to perceive significant discontinuities between ancient Neoplatonism and Christian mystical traditions:

  “...I had this experience of kind of like when you’re digging with a shovel and you hit something...the Plotinus I was reading was just much more alien and different and unexpectedly so than I had thought...” – David Albertson (04:25)

2. The Dominant Narrative: Apophatic (Negative) Mysticism

• There is a prevailing tendency in contemporary philosophy, especially continental philosophy of religion, to privilege apophatic mysticism (the “unsaying” of God, negation and formlessness), drawing heavily from figures like Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius and reaching through thinkers like Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion (09:32).
• Albertson questions whether this focus neglects other threads in the tradition, particularly the “cataphatic” or affirmative mystical writings—often by women in the vernacular—whose philosophical sophistication is underappreciated.

3. Introducing Tradition A and Tradition B

• Tradition A: The apophatic, formless, negative path, beginning with Plotinus—the view that the Divine is formlessness, and mysticism is about transcending all images and forms.
• Tradition B: The cataphatic, affirmative, form-based path, seeing God as the supreme form, and focusing on how forms, images, and geometric reasoning mediate divine presence.
• This distinction allows for a more nuanced genealogical account and challenges the standard, often exclusive identification of Christian mysticism with the apophatic tradition (11:35, 26:43).

4. The Significance of “Measure” and Geometry

• Measure as Core Concept:
  Geometry, in the book, is primarily about “measure”—a conceptual key for understanding how pre-modern Christian thinkers understood their relation to God, self, and world. This measure is not the post-17th-century, mathematically “objectified” conception but something more sacramental and spiritually relevant (16:58).

  “The real key, the core idea there is the idea of measure...the movements of measuring the world are immediately religiously relevant, not irrelevant. It's not a separate thing...” – David Albertson (17:11)

• Against Modern Binaries:
  Modernity sharply divides the measurable (cosmos) and the immeasurable (self and God), rendering the “world” religiously irrelevant, but medieval and patristic sources did not operate within this binary.

• Geometry in Practice:
  Diagrams, lines, proportions, intervals, and circumscription are not merely technicalities in ancient texts but are woven into the practice of Christian contemplation.

  “…what is the world measure that happens through and in Christian contemplation? What’s the geometry of Christian contemplation in that sense?” – David Albertson (22:36)

5. Traditions Applied: Plotinus Versus Christian Thinkers

• Plotinus (Tradition A):
  Plotinus innovates the idea of the formless absolute and insists the divine cannot love, cannot give itself, and must be elevated above geometrical measure (36:34, 37:44).

  • “Plotinus more or less invents the idea of the formless absolute...not in a way that was used in Plato’s texts...” – David Albertson (38:08)

• Christian Response (Tradition B):
  Contrary to Plotinus, Christian thinkers embrace forms—including geometrical forms—due to doctrines like the Incarnation (“God takes on a particular form in Jesus”), and posit God as “measure without measure” (46:26).

  • “...Christians believe that the One does love...the One gives of itself...and a permanent commitment of God to a form...that also means a greater familiarity and comfort with the geometrical measure of the world in the process of contemplation...” – David Albertson (47:03)

• Case Studies:

  • Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite: All focus on geometric, hierarchical, or visible mediations of the divine, challenging the image of Christian contemplation as purely apophatic.

6. Methodology and Broader Implications

• Original Languages Matter: Albertson’s attention to original texts and technical terminology reveals nuances often missed in translation (24:32).
• Beyond Geometry — The Quadrivium: This approach could be extended to harmonics/music (proportion, rhythm) and astronomy (spherical, cosmic measures), suggesting a wide-ranging project of retrieval (50:05).
• Connection to Technology:
  The conversation closes by relating the historical debate to current anxieties about quantification, digitality, and AI. Albertson suggests pre-modern thinkers were at home in a “mathematized cosmos,” and that their resources might help us rethink measure and embodiment in today’s world (58:33, 60:31).

  “...there could also be a different way of seeing. You know, to quote Plotinus, to wake to a different way of seeing.” – David Albertson (59:19)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Research Surprises:
  “...like when you're digging with a shovel and you hit something.”
  (David Albertson, 04:14)

• Critique of Apophatic Obsession:
  “People embrace this, I thought it's exotic part of the apophatic. It's very cool to negate. Right. But then you realize that a lot of the times people don't do what I call the dirty work and going into the trenches in order to really understand what is going on in these others. They just pick the jewel, so to speak. Oh, the sexy stuff, as I call it. Right, the negation. And they run with it.”
  (Interviewer, 14:01)

• On Measure and Pre-Modern Thought:
  “They had a very free engagement and use with the...with measuring the world as an element of their Christian mysticism, as an element of their Christian contemplation that was sort of organically and, you know, just sort of unquestioned.”
  (David Albertson, 22:12)

• On Breaking Modern Binaries:
  “...it's vague and it stays inside the post-17th-century binary between the poetic and the mathematic, between language and number.”
  (David Albertson, 27:05)

• On “Tradition B”:
  “For these authors, God is not supreme formlessness, but God is supreme form. It's not that negation doesn't have a role, but it has a role to...expose the singularity, the supremacy, the uniqueness of this divine form in which all other forms participate.”
  (David Albertson, 28:29)

• On the Stakes for Today:
  “...these were Christian contemplatives who were at home in a mathematized cosmos. It wasn't a cause for alienation. It wasn't a cause for draining the sacrality out of the cosmos. It was actually somehow a mediation for them...”
  (David Albertson, 58:57)

• On Technology and the Future:
  “What we would need is a way of not being forced to retreat from our technological measurements...but to work through those technological ways of seeing and being which themselves become a kind of icon...”
  (David Albertson, 60:34)

Important Timestamps

• 03:39 — Albertson’s background, transition from arithmetic to geometry
• 09:32 — Critique of apophatic mysticism’s contemporary dominance
• 16:58 — Discussion of “measure” and geometry as religiously meaningful
• 22:36 — How medievals engaged “world measure” in contemplation
• 26:43 — Introduction of Traditions A (apophatic) and B (cataphatic)
• 37:44 — Deconstructing Plotinus on formlessness, love, gift, and measure
• 47:03 — The Christian embrace of form, gift, love, and geometry
• 58:33 — Reflections on quantification, AI, and lessons for today

Structure of the Book (as discussed)

• First Half: Analysis of Plotinus and the construction of the formless divine (Tradition A)
• Second Half: Case studies of Christian authors (Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite) who revise or reject the Plotinian model (Tradition B)
• Proposed Future Work: Extending the analysis into the Middle Ages and further quadrivial arts, such as harmonics and astronomy.

Closing Thoughts

David Albertson’s The Geometry of Christian Contemplation seeks to reshape the study of Christian mysticism by highlighting neglected traditions, questioning entrenched narratives, and proposing new ways of reading ancient texts. This episode offers a remarkable blend of scholarly rigor, personal friendship, and relevance to contemporary questions about technology and meaning. It invites both specialists and broader audiences to reconsider what it means to “measure” the world and encounter the divine.