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David Albertson, "The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure Without Measure" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:04:19
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- [00:00]
David Albertson
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Interviewer/Colleague
It is a dreary cold evening in January evening in Chicago. I think it's zero Fahrenheit and my interlocutor, Dr. Professor David Albertson, friend and colleague and mentor is in Southern Cal Bonnie, Southern California. Some people are in paradise and it's a joy to be be together with him. We go back more than 20 years and David has been like an older brother to me and always there and I don't think I would have finished my program if it wasn't for people like you and like an angel, taking care and looking after. And David has been teaching at the University of Southern California for since 2007 after he graduated from the University of Chicago. And we share common professors and mentors. Professor Bernard McGinn, Professor David Tracy of blessed memory and Professor Jean Luc Marion. So David has published now a second book after an amazing and important book called Mathematical Theologies Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres. Very important book and I hope we'll understand why it is so important. And this second book in a way continues, if not maybe serves rather as a prequel, as I understand it, to that book and David will hopefully clarify that for us. And the second book is called the Geometry of Christian Contemplation. So David, welcome and can you please Tell us the story you want to tell. Because I've known you for many years, and as I read these, I somehow understand where these books are coming from. And I remember some of the conversations we've had and some of the presentations you've done over the years. And you one of the people who actually carries through, which is quite amazing. Please, David.
- [03:40]
David Albertson
Well, thank you for the invitation for this conversation. It's great to be in dialogue with someone who shares a lot of the same reference points, but is also who's a dear friend. So I've been looking forward to this. So my first book came out in 2014, mathematical theologies. I was interested in the ways that number and really the medieval quadrivium had been activated in medieval Christian thought in the 12th and 15th centuries, and which maybe gave us some new perspectives to think about, the history of philosophy, because we put so much weight on a kind of turn toward the geometrical, the mathematization of the universe in the 17th century with Descartes and Galileo. This is a narrative that's been since Husserl and Alexander Coiret and Martin Heidegger and so forth. But these two figures really disrupted that. So I thought that was very fascinating. But for a second project, I was all the while looking at also diagrams. Diagrams, especially in Nicholas of cusa in the 15th century. But this means moving from numbers that are invisible towards something visible. And it engages a whole different sort of set of questions about, you know, the icon, for example, in the history of Christianity, or the way that Christian contemplation and Christian mysticism is indelibly a kind of visual enterprise, even if there's other somatic elements that come alongside it in different mystical texts. So I was thinking, okay, I'm going to go from arithmetic in the quadrivium to the second science of geometry, and I'll write a nice short book on similar questions in medieval mysticism in geometry. And I thought I would just start with a kind of summary background chapter. So I had a sabbatical in 2015, and I sat down to read through some Greek Neoplatonist texts, which I really thought was going to be a kind of introduction. And I had this experience of kind of like when you're digging with a shovel and you hit something. And it kind of interrupted my progress because the Plotinus I was reading was just much more alien and different and unexpectedly so than I had thought when I was thinking about where I wanted to go to get back to medieval Christian mystical texts, because I had always learned and read in sort of basic introductions that you have, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Proclus, and then it sort of is the next step in a continuous narrative where those texts are absorbed and adapted and embellished, but basically sustained in Christian contemplation in the ancient world and then in Christian mysticism and medieval texts. But there's sort of a continuity there. Knowing that, of course, Plotinus is not available to the medievals, but maybe if you do different conduits, especially Augustine, there was kind of a through line. What I was finding in Plotinus when I got deeper into the sources and read more than just a few Enneads that I had read in graduate school, was that this is a theological construction which is very different than what a lot of Christian texts, especially ancient and medieval Christian texts, that were thinking about the Trinity and the Incarnation. And it wasn't just a sort of difference in language, but I felt like something much deeper. So it took me a while to regroup and to realize that I wanted to write a different kind of book, maybe just the first half of a sequel or a prequel to the first book that would really only allow me to work in the Greek sources primarily. And I still hope for another project at some point in the future to get to a second part of this volume of geometry, but to work on, you know, the middle ages, properly speaking, 12th to 15th century, especially mystical texts. So that's still to come. So this project is really a revisionist one of trying to, you know, of course there's lots of continuities between Platinian Neoplatonism and Christian contemplation in the ancient and medieval world. But there's also discontinuities, and I feel like those had been kind of effaced and lost. The second sort of. So that's one motivation. The second sort of motivation was having been teaching and reading and following scholarship and especially looking at the ways that contemporary philosophy of religion, continental philosophy, is interested in mysticism. There's been a great investment in apophatic mysticism, of unsaying about God, of the way their language always falls short of defining who God is, of using negation as a way to isolate and have some sort of intimation of the one. And, you know, we have Jacques Derrida reading Pseudo Dionysius. We have Jean Luc Marion, his student, contesting his reading. They're sort of debating the 6th century Syrian monk, interestingly, in the 70s, that's quite interesting. We have this sort of immense investment in Meister Eckhart as a kind of paradigm of mysticism, from which I learned very much from our common teacher, Bernard McGinn. But I wondered if we weren't neglecting the other wing or the other lung of the tradition and mysticism of the cataphatic mystics, which are mostly women writing in the vernacular. Very unusual texts, very colorful. And of course, they're important. We know that some of the first books written by women in the vernacular in the medieval west are these mystical texts. That's important in and of itself. But are they viewed as sort of quietly, less philosophically interesting? Are they somehow more, even though no one wouldn't say this out loud, but sort of more elementary, philosophically unrefined? They don't occasion the kind of wonder that you feel when you read Dionysius or Eckhart. And I was wondering about that, and I wondered if it wasn't something that had to do with this misunderstanding of Plotinus. So my gambit in the book is to try to document the specificity of Plotinian Neoplatonism, to relativize our sort of picture of just how central and permanently relevant and central Plotinus is for later Christian mysticism, and so to offer a kind of alternative genealogy of Christian contemplation that looks at the specificity of the beginning point in Plotinus admits that there's a whole strand that continues that most of all in Augustine, but not only also in people like Evagorius of Pontus, for example, but then also tries to build out a better picture of the way that some of those specifically and contingently Plotinian configurations are overturned in the succeeding centuries by Christian authors as they deepen their own reflection on the Incarnation and the Trinity, but especially the Incarnation. So I tried to isolate kind of, you know, a couple elements that go into Plotinian contemplation to name better for us as readers and scholars and historians, its signature, its particular signature, and then to show that each of those components are called into question by Christian authors in subsequent centuries. So that's the sort of book structure, three parts of Plotinus, and then three moments of overturning. That also means, though, that it covers a thousand years, but it's a relatively short book for that amount of time, because it's really just sort of taking some case studies to examine. And surely there's lots of other instances that I hope now, with the kind of vocabulary I try to develop in my analysis in the book, that we can then look at other interesting figures and hold them up to the light and say, how can we read them? I hope how can we read them? I hope better in light of this counter narrative that I've tried to defend in the book.
- [11:35]
Interviewer/Colleague
So basically you distinguish between two traditions of mysticism or of using apophases and kataphasis. And maybe we should. You should explain also what apophases and Caraphas are, because the public might. Some of the public might not be so specialized as us medieval theologians. Right, sure. So you distinguish two traditions, which you call Tradition A, and Tradition A is basically starting with Plotina, or at least going through Plotinus. But then you also discern this other tradition called Tradition B. And you show that there are some important differences. And. Okay, so that's the question. But before that, I want to kind of clarify for the listeners that your method and the way you operate is just very precise and very detailed. At the same time, you also have an amazing way to pose the big questions, right? Because there are some big questions that guide you both in this project and in the previous project. So one question that you already.
- [13:04]
David Albertson
Pointed.
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Interviewer/Colleague
To is this question of how do Christian theologians use language? And how do you make positive, let's say, catapheric statements about God, and then how those are negated through apophases or unsane. And you correctly indicated that indeed, that there seems to be a privileging of the apophatic for different reasons. Right. And I've shared some. I've been quite frustrated over the years because of this apophatic obsession. And sometimes this obsession also came because of a certain sloppiness, I have to say, because 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. The jewel, so to speak. Oh, the sexy stuff, as I call it. Right, the gation. And they run with it. But what is amazing about your scholarship, you actually go into the trenches and spend a lot of time there in order to really point to the theory, grain and nuances of these authors. And that's very important. Now, the bigger question, as I understand it, is the question of what you call the matesis, right. And the matesis universalis that we find in Descartes. But then you show in your previous book, well, it's way more complicated than people like Husserl or Heidegger assume. In fact, this question has A medieval history that you partially trace in your first book. And in the process you uncover a separate tradition of Christian mysticism which you call Christian neopythagoreanism, which was less known or less talked about than Neoplatonism. So you show how matasis for these people is in a way much richer. Right. And imbued by a lot of theological notions, especially based on the Incarnation, the notion of Christ's incarnation. And I think that question also somehow guides you a bit more in the background also in this book. Right. Because one way you choose to discuss, to approach or to modify the apophatic cataphatic, say tension, is to bring in this lens of the geometrical. And that is a question in itself.
- [16:10]
David Albertson
Why?
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Interviewer/Colleague
Right. Because you take on Rowan Williams, who perceives something similar problem. Well, we have to get out of this simplistic embrace of the apophatic. And he suggests, well, notion of the poetics I would have maybe is like, what about things like the Sacramento? Right. And then as I was saying, like, why the geometrical? I'm not necessarily seeing a contradiction, but it's interesting in itself that you opt for the geometrical as a way out or maybe as some kind of a solution to this. Okay. I mean, I put a lot on the table.
- [16:58]
David Albertson
Yeah, that's a good question. Because some of the early reviewers I got of the book also, they said, this all sounds like an interesting history, but why the obsession with geometry in particular? So when I talk about geometry, and I chose the title a bit provocatively to kind of foreground that as a provocation. But the real key, the core idea there is the idea of measure. And another way to describe the project of the book is how can we read authors in the first millennium, you know, before the 17th century, but let's just even say the first millennium. And to make sure that we're reading their texts without assuming they share our post 17th century understanding of what religion is. In other words, they have a certain freedom that we don't. When they're writing about God and the self, they're also, and you know, I think with every stroke of the pen, they're also speaking about the world and other, what we might call the sort of sacramental cosmos. But they're speaking about the world. There's a three dimensional referentiality there to the self, to God and to world painting with very broad strokes. But just to orient US after the 17th century, our change, you know, our relationship to the world changes. The world becomes something we can, or we imagine we can more Exhaustively measure. This is Descartes idea of a universal mathematics or a mathesis universalis. This is a term that Heidegger picks up as a sort of signature for that event. So let's say after the 17th century, after the mathematization of the cosmos, the world is subject to measure. That's what it means to be the world, to be a world of manipulable, technologically masterable object. Whereas there remains the self, which is invisible, interior, and there remains the divine God who's invisible and in some connection with the self. But what we call religion then becomes kind of a commerce or an exchange or a nexus between the immeasurable self and the immeasurable God and the world. The cosmos is, on the contrary, on the other side of the binary, something subject to measure. That's what it means to be world. And therefore it's religiously irrelevant. It's religiously inapposite because it's measurable, that makes it an object. So I don't think this is the way that Gregory of Nissa thinks about the world, or Evagrus the Pontus, or Maximus Confessor, or anyone, let's say in the first century. Rather, everything they say about the self, the soul, everything they say about God is co implying this other dimension of the world, which is to say, if we want to wrestle with our distance from them so that we can read them more adequately, we have to confront this problem of world measure. And we have to go, you know, work overtime, so to speak, right. To correct for our particular standpoint and the parallax, it kind of, you know, constructs we have to overcorrect for our standpoint by asking how do they speak about measuring the world? That question is like the antidote to our modern intellectual biases, right? Because we've excluded the world because of its measurability, they don't participate in that. I propose, you know, before the 17th century, in the first millennium, they're not excluding the world because of its measurability, which means movements of measuring the world are immediately religiously relevant, not irrelevant. It's not a separate thing. It's not, you know, as Peter Harrison has shown us very well, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to talk about religion and science in the first millennium. But I just want to add to that that this vector of world measure, that's really where the rubber hits the road. That's what distinguishes our conception of interior religion and a non transcendent cosmos. That's what distinguishes them from us. On Those points. So this is why I focus on measure. And so I returned to some of those texts that I had read before, like Pseudo Dionysius, you know, and just asked, does he speak about measure? Or I would go back to the iconophiles who were arguing about very different things about the validity of Images in this 8th and 9th century and Christian contemplation. And what is the image and what is an icon? What is an idol? And to my surprise, if we just suspend our kind of presuppositions for a moment, they're talking about measure, line, figure, distance, proportion, circumscription, even the term, the diagram, which appears in some of those texts about icons, you know, all the time. So 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. Not just the self, not just God, but also measuring the world. So this is where I was interested in, you know, in the first millennium. What is the world measure that happens through and in Christian contemplation? What's the geometry of Christian contemplation in that sense? So it's a little bit of a complex and equivocal use of the term because we're saying geometry. Maybe we first think of the 17th century sense of it. But then really what underlies that is a pre modern native use that I'm trying to reference, or I call this world measure in the first couple parts of the book. But then that becomes the question, so what is an affirmative way of speaking about the divine in mysticism? How do we identify a better basis for our appreciation of the cataphatic element, the affirmative element, not just the negative, the apophatic. And is one possible strategy to recover the kind of dignity and integrity of the cataphatic, to examine the geometrical coefficients of the way that those texts are thinking through what contemplation is. So that's what guided that question. It's a little bit complex, but it's a proposal. It's a proposal to say this is a way we can read to retrieve the cataphatic, what it will take for us to break out of our sort of bewitchment by the apophatic, what will break the spell. Looking for, very specifically and concretely looking for moments in which Christian contemplatives engaged measure, figure, line, distance, diastema. In Gregory of Nyssa, for example, the interval moments of I think the biggest term there we could use is measure as a category. So that's my sort of agenda, which I'm just sketching. But I'm also inviting others who work in similar fields of texts to consider this as a method for us to be able to retrieve, with a little more authenticity and a little less myopia of our kind of post enlightenment thinking about religion. When we're reading these mystical texts, how can we hear them as generously as possible?
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Interviewer/Colleague
So it's not, let's say, an exclusive perspective, right. Because I think as I read it, it's an attempt to retrieve the possibility of, let's say, contemplation of something beyond the self, which we call, let's say, nature, cosmos. Right. And I've had that preoccupation in the dissertation with the original. I called it mediation, right. What mediates between the self and God. And what you show with great acumen is that these people are indeed very precise. They know their technicalities. You really demonstrate that they are very. They know their handbooks, right. The way they speak. Right. And especially your merit is you read the original languages and it kind of lights up like a Christmas, Christmas tree, right? You see the nuances. It's not just the porridge there, right. But it seems to me that I think, should I put it, the scope. Not the scope, the framework is a bit bigger because so larger. So geometry would be part of that framework and the general framework would be how do you retrieve a meaningful way to speak about something more than the self and God, Right. Like a certain sense of exteriority.
- [26:14]
David Albertson
That's right. That's right.
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Interviewer/Colleague
And right, so you don't want to, or you say, well, you push against what Rowan calls poetics. But if you read Dionysius, right, He has, you know, besides the language of geometry, he has the language of, I mean, which perfectly discussed hierarchies, sacraments, ritual, right? Those are all forms to, let's say, to create a certain ecstasies, Right?
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David Albertson
That's right, yeah. I mean, yeah, there's a couple other ways. I mean, in the very biggest frame, as you just alluded to, I think the question I want to ask is how can we speak about the presence of God in the world without only reverting to, or confiding ourselves to the poetic?
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Interviewer/Colleague
Because that's vague.
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David Albertson
It's vague and it stays Inside the post 17th century binary between the poetic and the mathematic, between language and number. That's not only in the 17th century. But for example, if you want to talk about God's presence in the world. It would not be now, I would think, a matter of measuring where God is. It would be more like, well, God is sort of close to us in an experience of nature. If you look at certain currents in eco theology and they want to talk about the imminence of God in the world, the project becomes methodologically in those sort of works which are all doing good work. But the project is relatively quickly confined to generating a new poetic metaphor that would allow us to imagine the imminence of God in the world. Because what religion can do vis a vis world in our period is to poetize, but not to measure. Once it becomes a matter of measurement, we hand it over to the sciences. It's a desacralized world. So is there a sort of sacramental realism that's not only confined with the generation of more and more interesting metaphors and poetic interventions? To me, when I read ecotheology with great hope, what I often see is like just another metaphor, maybe a retrieval of an older metaphor that's recast and more beautifully rendered, that's valuable as well. But this is a divide between what Alain Badiou calls the poem and the matheme, the poetic and the mathematic. And he's describing in that he sees that as a sort of division that is a paraphrase for Husserl's analysis in the crisis that, you know, and then Husserl and bed you both dated to the 17th century with Descartes and Galileo. So we're all talking about the sort of same periodization. These are different terms for it. So yes, that's to answer that first part on the second part about it, it's like when we're reading Dionysius, there's other things going on. Absolutely. And as you know, like I talk about the meaning of hierarchy, or the cyclical emanation, or the function of divine naming, or even the name of Jesus, which Dionysius spends a surprising amount of time on. In that particular case study and in the others, I tried to look at instances of world measure, but also at a deeper level to look at how are they talking about either God as form or God as formless. And this goes back to, you know, what you said, my terms tradition A and tradition B. So my sort of proposal here, as we're reading the history of Christian mysticism is we're all unwittingly like the bed of procrustes, you know, confining the tradition to one story. And the story is, as Plotinus showed, all forms are relative because the divine, the one, is formless. And so the apophatic is privileged because it's the one that's really quite good at erasing those forms. To point us toward the formless. I call this Tradition A, where the divine is formlessness. And I think this structures a lot of our discourses on religion, on the sensibility of comparative religion, on religious studies as an enterprise, maybe even 19th century Kant and Hegel, approaches to philosophy and philosophy of religion. I just covered that briefly, more briefly than I would have wished, by the way, but just as a sort of sketch the alternative. The Tradition B is another robust thread in the history of Christian contemplation. And 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 sort of expose the singularity, the supremacy, the uniqueness of this divine form in which all other forms participate. So I propose that there's some authors that fit better in this second rendering when we're talking about what Christian contemplation is, and that fit uneasily in that first version. So it's not a matter of sort of sorting people into bucket A and bucket B, as some have responded to the book. I'm proposing as a sort of heuristic to propose two ideal types and to argue that a lot of authors who we might consider important really don't fit very well in the first category. And they're probably in real life. Everyone's sort of split between lots of different tendencies. Augustine might be a signal case of being. Why is Augustine so important? It's precisely because he's split perfectly down the middle between Tradition A and Tradition B. You know, that might be a conversation for another day, but I try to expose a couple authors, most of all Dionysius, Boethius, and people like John of Damascus and Theodore the studite, who I think are much better, and then maybe others that we would name like Nicholas of Cusa, who would belong more into Tradition B than to Tradition A. So it's not about insisting that one is more proper or by no means more Christian than the other or something like that, but it's just allowing us to have two different approaches to retrieving these ancient and medieval texts and to figure out which ones are adequate. But if it is the case that there are two of these, then that would change the way that we think about the history of Christian contemplation.
- [32:56]
Interviewer/Colleague
But why, as I was reading this, why didn't you do Aryujina as I'm.
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David Albertson
Yes, yes, lots of cases. I mean, maybe the most complex cases are the ones which I didn't treat. Maybe I wasn't able to. Or maybe they are the real world examples that don't fit so neatly into this typology. My goal was to make the typology legible and credible, but that means looking at cases that are fairly straightforward, you know. So, for example, Boethius uses the term vera forma, true form, to define God in De Trinitate. So there it is. It's not that God is formless, as Plotinus says endlessly, but God is in fact form, not formless. So there's a contradiction there. So that was. That's a very visible, you know, conspicuous non platinian idea that we find that an important Christian author who had such important, you know, legacy in later centuries, Erugina, a really interesting case because he's synthesizing Aejuna better than everyone. Augustine, Dionysius. Right. And trying to bring these. Boethius as well, and trying to bring these different threads together. So, you know, if my hypothesis is right, if we were to do a careful reading of perifusion on the division of nature and Erugena, we would find. I would guess I haven't done this. I haven't done this yet, but if you gave me a homework to go check out Erugeena and sort of apply the method, I would hypothesize that we're going to see several strands kind of competing and maybe a kind of important fruitful generative structural tension between formless and formlessness in the way that Erugenet constructs negation. Absolutely. I think that's the case, but I hope that's the kind of work that I could inspire and other scholars to do.
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Interviewer/Colleague
Like it is very helpful, actually. It is, because reading your book really reinforced some of my intuitions and some things I tried to deal with in Erijuna is exactly this tension between the apophatic and his total use of Dialectic of the Arts. Right. So you see that there is a tension there which is real.
- [35:32]
David Albertson
Right?
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Interviewer/Colleague
Yeah, I totally agree that one of the most probably difficult way difficult aspects of reading the book is the amount of detail. And I appreciate it very much because it really show. I mean, you have this ability to bring together so many aspects and so many nuances, but nevertheless, always you're with the reader and the reader knows where you are. I think that's a great quality to. To simplify in a good way. But can we maybe can you provide a bit more detail, put a bit more meat on these two traditions, Tradition A and B. Specifically, let's talk, you know, about Plotinus and then maybe talk a bit about tradition B and who the main representatives are. You already talked about Dionysus, but then maybe you can talk about the others, but please, they thought about maybe Apollitinus.
- [36:35]
David Albertson
Yeah, let's start with Plotinus, because I feel like Plotinus is sort of, you know, the obsession of the book. You're right, and does go rather far down the Plotinus rabbit hole. There's so much scholarship. We actually have a lot of his writings, and it's just had just successive waves of massive influence on ancient thought through different channels. Medieval thought and the Renaissance and early Modernity and the Cambridge Platonists and, you know, lots of. Of later readers up until the 20th century. So I felt like I had to contend with Plotinus above all, and I had to do a job of it that I hope it took me a couple extra years. Right. But a job of it that would sort of stand up in court with the Plotinus scholarship, you know, because work on Neoplatonism is still developing apace and we're discovering new texts all the time in the history of Neoplatonism. So Plotinus is an author. He's writing in the mid-200s. He's not Christian. He knows about Christianity, he knows about Judaism. He's an ascetic, he's a philosopher, giving seminars to whoever wants to show up.
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Interviewer/Colleague
He.
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David Albertson
Is reading Plato in a new way about four or five hundred years after Plato. That's really synthesizing other streams of philosophy like Aristotle and Stoicism and even some sort of Near Eastern religions that might have influenced maybe even Christian. Gnosticism is a new hypothesis about reading Plotinus. So Plotinus represents a kind of new level of what Platonic philosophy could be and would be that we call Neoplatonism. And then there are success of different kinds of Neoplatonism after Plotinus. But he really represents a kind of rupture in their possibilities, a new level, a leveling up. Many histories of Christian mysticism, of Christian mysticism, begin with chapter one. Plotinus, you know, who's perhaps neither a mystic nor certainly not a Christian, but he had such influence, especially on Augustine, who's reading him about 150 years later through one of the first Latin translations. And Augustine says, you know, I wouldn't have converted to Christianity except for the influence of Plotinus. And he goes on, talks and qualifies that, but talks about that in detail in the Confessions in book seven. So Plotinus has this sort of like a real Virkungsgesichte, like an effective history in the legacy of Christian contemplation. And I think also he plays a kind of outsized symbolic role. Like, to be a Christian contemplative is to be like Augustine, to wrestle with Plotinus, to sift out what is true, what needs to be supplemented. You know, Christian contemplation is that which supplements Plotinus ever since Augustine. So it's just this massive function and kind of status. When we dig into the texts, I was surprised, as I'm educating myself and I'm reading the scholarship and on these particular points, that Plotinus more or less invents the idea of the formless absolute. If we say, today, you know, can't all the religions get along? And if we say, you know, they're all kind of different languages or different modes of dress, so to speak, you know, different diets, but it's still basically the same religious experience, because the core of those religions we compare against is a kind of unmarked, neutral absolute, the divine, the transcendent. And then any kind of forms, figures, colors, layerings, flavors. You add on top of that are an optional, secondary, interesting kind of take on the absolute, but not the absolute, which is held in common between all these. Right. This is a little bit of a caricature, but I think that actually is still a quite familiar way that we talk about religious diversity. Right. This whole idea that the absolute one, the divine, is in itself without form. The Greek is, and it's a term that Plotinus more or less constructs and uses in a peculiar way, not in a way that was used in Plato's texts, as scholars have known for 100 years, not in a way that Dionysius uses it, not in a way that Proclus uses it. So what goes into the construction of the formless and Plotinus? This is a question that has massive consequences for the identity of Christian contemplation, especially for a religion that believes that God took on a very particular form in the body of Jesus. There seems to be at least a tension there. And Augustine is very wittingly in the Confessions in book seven, saying, I read some things in Plotinus that really harmonized with my understanding of Christianity and other things needed to be supplemented. And he says it needed to be supplemented in the direction of the incarnation, for example. So this is the state of the question. My question was, how does Plotinus construct this new idea? And I propose in the book There are three parts, and this is the part that I beg the patience of my readers and my friend, you know, for sort of going down the rabbit hole into the. Into the weeds. But we had to figure out what are the building blocks and the components of this idea of the formless, the formless divine, which has been so influential. The first, there's three of them. I'll just do them briefly. The first one is, Plotinus says, the Divine One can be loved, but is not able to love because that would be imposing a kind of form, dependency, relationship, etc. So that's axiom number one. The second one is the One the Divine One cannot give. It can't give a gift. That's also a mode of dependency and it certainly cannot give itself, which kind of is completely nonsensical inside the framework of Plotinus understanding of the divine. The Divine, he says instead, is that which gives what it does not have. It's a mode of kind of passive receiving by the give e that involves no movement of gifts, certainly not a self gift by the One that's absolutely proscribed. That would be to give a form to the One, but the One is formless. And finally, and we'll just sort of name this and leave it aside because it gets more technical, but the One cannot be identified with the Logos, the intellect, the ideas. Of course, Christians teach precisely the opposite, that the One is the Logos, and this is the idea of the Trinity. So each of these, I think, and maybe we can hear it first, you know, even at first hearing, is in some tension with Christian ideas. And lo and behold, they're each confronted in different ways, right? So Christians believe that the One does love, and Christians believe that the One gives of itself. I mean, most dramatically in the kenosis of Jesus. And if you know, and then Christians have beliefs about the One being the Logos, and maybe we'll put that to the side. But there's a tension here. So that's sort of the first level when dealing with Plotinus. The second level is it also turns out that in the construction of his idea of the formless One, Plotinus pushes off against a very specific element of his influences. Some of his influences he absorbs whole clothes, others he's in tension with. One of them that he pushes off against and is in tension with is a Neo Pythagorean influence. So Plotinus has a kind of suspicion of geometrical measure of line in the construction of the idea of the formless One. He needs to also make less important the role of geometrical Figuration, geometrical measure. Those are the last forms that you kind of erase as you're moving up higher to ascend to the formless one. Geometrical figuration of the world. That's the sort of one that can really trick you. So Plotinus puts a special target on that one. To reemphasize, you need to erase even those cosmic measures as you ascend to the formless one. So now we have a rejection of the geometrical, a rejection of the idea of the one loving, and a rejection of the one's self gift in order to inscribe the figure of the formless One. That's how we construct that concept. So this sets up a hypothesis like it would seem that later Christians. Go ahead.
- [44:57]
Interviewer/Colleague
Sorry to interrupt. Is the rejection of the geometrical similar or parallel with his rejection of the theurgical? Are they similar or. Because I know he also is a different strain of Neoplatonism, unlike proclamation in the Umbilicus.
- [45:14]
David Albertson
That's right.
- [45:15]
Interviewer/Colleague
Or is that a different issue?
- [45:17]
David Albertson
There's a connection there for him. I mean, that's sort of reading it back into his. He didn't have any notion of that because it hasn't happened yet. But in the 4th and 5th and 6th century, Neoplatonism takes a turn in Iamlichus and Proclus in two ways. One, a turn toward the ritual, the theurgical, which is a kind of engagement with the cosmic, specifically with materiality. And then secondly, a turn back again. This is very illuminating, a turn in later Neoplatonism that moves beyond Plotinus by growing closer to Neopythagoreanism, by embracing the pertinence of the mathematical, which is to say, to take a step away from Plotinus, because his construction of the one is anti geometrical, anti mathematical. The forms, the figures, the numbers, the structures, the measures, all of those are in need of erasure in a way that they're not for Proclus, for example. Right. Proclus writes a commentary on Euclid, going.
- [46:23]
Interviewer/Colleague
Back to the Christian hypothesis, where I interrupted you.
- [46:27]
David Albertson
So this is sort of my reading of Plotinus, and I'm trying to render it, you know, contingent, just one thread of ideas, not a kind of permanent setting for all contemplation. By no means a kind of platform for considering, you know, lots of different religions and their diversity, the formless One, but just something that's sort of, you know, one idea that one author had in the third century. So this raises a question of that. When we have Christian engagement with this idea in different ways or at least we have Christian contemplation. Even if they didn't know Plotinus. That's another interesting question. But even if they weren't reading Plotinus specifically, does their belief in the Incarnation and the kind of permanent commitment of God to a form and the permanent commitment of God to self, gift, and the permanent commitment of God to loving, does that also mean, interestingly, my hypothesis would predict it also means a greater familiarity and comfort with the geometrical measure of the world in the process of contemplation. In other words, it's the Christians who, by virtue of the incarnation, make contemplation more cosmic. They're not retreating into their own mystical selves. It's the contrary. They're being driven out because of their belief in the Incarnation to critique the acosmic contemplation of Plotinus and instead to turn Christian contemplation into something that's fascinated with measure, interval, figure, line diagram. Right. Exteriority. I say instead of interiority. So that's a sort of interesting idea. But the proof of the pudding would be when we go back and read Dionysus, when we read the magisterial iconophiles like John of Damascus, the Byzantine authors, Theodore the Studite, do they happen to be talking about geometry? It turns out, also to my surprise, they do actually, quite a lot. And so that's sort of. That's the other part of the book where after looking at Plotinus, we construct a question we can ask of first millennium texts in Christian contemplation. And we ask, what are they saying? Kind of sideways about world, about cosmos, in the language that we can call geometrical. And so there's these fascinating passages where you see that taking place. It's time to hit reset. Not the snooze button, reset the crank it up, start fresh, go big. Reset. Dave's killer bread believes greatness starts with killer taste, killer nutrition. And now a shot to rock your reset for real.
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Interviewer/Colleague
As you were talking, a question came to mind. Would you agree that different authors can, let's say, obtain the same thing through different methods? So some do through geometry. And actually, you prove in your first book that those guys use arithmetic, right?
- [49:46]
David Albertson
Yeah.
- [49:46]
Interviewer/Colleague
And here's like, again, my obsession with erusion. I think Aryushna is, is more on the neopythagorean, so he's more into he, he plays with those numbers. So you think those are optional tools, let's say in the box, to, to achieve a certain type of, let's say mediation, Measurability.
- [50:06]
David Albertson
Mediation, yeah, mediation is a very good term for it, I agree. Yes. There must be multiple tools in the box. I mean, let's propose this. I just tried to take a quick snapshot in the first book of the way that arithmetic theology in the 12th and 15th centuries can carve out a space for our appreciation of tradition. B in the second book, the way that geometry, which moves from the invisible to the visible, from the point to the line, right. From number to measure, from the discontinuous to the continuous in the original quadrivium sort of system that this is the second dimension. And we're just now doing a snapshot of 6th century, 9th century, 12th century. Right. Of just seeing the sort of flashpoints of. But that it's fruitful if we think in this way, if we read in this way. But it's almost like one would need to keep going and test out the other dimension of the quadrivium, the other dimension that we think about, the structure of the world, which would be what's left? Musica, harmonics. And there's different names for the last one, but the best one is probably spherics. It's like kind of solids, you know, astronomy, astrology, astronomy. Okay, different dimensions. But let's just take harmonics, right. So is there a kind of third pass through the pre 17th century period in Christian spirituality or mysticism which engages with the proportion, the rhythm, the dynamics of music, harmonics, the tempo, the rhythm. In other words, how we think about, if I can just, you know, how we think about the event. The event.
- [52:08]
Interviewer/Colleague
I mean, there is in Kepler, right. Kepler was obsessed with those proportions. And one of the reasons he didn't approve of a certain physical hypothesis is precisely because it didn't fit with this harmonics business.
- [52:27]
David Albertson
Yes. And it's not only a cosmic harmonics, but again, just like it was mathematical theology about the way that number mediation can help us think God as word, but also God as number in those authors. And here it's also God as measure. The subtitle of this book is Measure without Measure, which is a divine name that Augustine invents. Measure without Measure. He's speaking of God. So God is number, God is measure. So it'd be something about like the way that we can use harmonics, rhythm, tempo, temporality as a third layer of retrieval of the quadrivium out of the first millennium to combat our acosmism in our attempts to name God. Right. To look for resources, to look for recoveries of elements from, let's say, the first millennium that are speaking about event and whatever its contrary is. So that would be another project. But yeah. So in other words, yes, I admit this is just sort of soundings, you know, this is like stratigraphic samples and soil analysis just to get a few, just to sort of construct a field so that we know what questions to keep asking. But I hope to, you know, invite others on the same work.
- [53:48]
Interviewer/Colleague
I think it's more than soundings. I mean, because you, you managed to really, you know, you know, paint a canvas of an entire language, right. That is there, right. And that most of the time maybe we just go through like, oh, whatever those terms. But you really show, well, these people, you know, pay attention to the way they, you know, construct these arguments, right? And it's not sloppy, it's, it's not random, it's very carefully done, it's precise. They use certain terms in a certain way. And the way you put Dionysius together with the Iconophiles, I think is very strong because you show, well, those people, the two of them, right? John the John of Damascus and Theodore the Stalite, they were involved in real.
- [54:44]
David Albertson
Time debates about the visible and how to read Dionysius.
- [54:51]
Interviewer/Colleague
Right. Which is another because some, we don't really think that they were very important readers of Dionysus. Right. And we stop with Dionysus and we sometimes we go straight to Derrida, right.
- [55:08]
David Albertson
Or Eckhart. We have an Eckhart in Dionysus. That's right, yeah, that's right, yeah. I mean the real, the interesting question for me, and I deliberately kept his name out of the book entirely, but I work a lot on Nicholas of Cusa. The first book was about Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas of Cusa is not in this book. I hope he makes it into the second half. I view this book as sort of the first half of a sequel to Mathematical Theologies. But in the second half I'll have to pose a controversial question. Is Nicholas of Cusa our great apophatic Renaissance theologian? He's certainly a reader of Dionysius. He's certainly influenced by Eckhart and knows Eckhart. And often he's listed in the same list in the same breath as Plotinus, Dionysius, Eckhart, And Kouzanus, right. As sort of great apophatic theologians. But I wonder if he's not rather a citizen of tradition. B. I wonder if he's not actually a great cataphatic theologian. That's a bit provocative, but I think there's something there. And that would mean that as much as he's close to Meister Eckhart, he's also doing something that's kind of unwittingly, but from our perspective, in harmony with the great women mystics, the cataphatic mystics, that he's also doing something that's in synchrony with them, even though it might look like it at first glance. But he's interested in figuration. He's interested in the iconic, he's interested in the visible. He's interested in, not to put too fine a point on it, the geometrical and different ways in which the practice of Christian contemplation is itself a geometrical activity. That's Kusanus. Right. So that would mean that he's sort of arriving belatedly to the cataphatic enterprise that we first see sketched out classically in some of the women mystics, you know. But that would mean thinking about Kouzanas in the company of the women mystics, which is, you know, not frequently done, but. And a little bit strange as a proposal. But that's what I'm thinking about now, after this book.
- [57:18]
Interviewer/Colleague
Wonderful. And before we end, I wanted to, you know, you. You to ask a question more along the speculative lines you discuss in your first book. Discuss? Look, what happened with mathematization and quantification, which has run amok, right? And the cloud and everything is transformed and reduced to number and quantity, right? And I couldn't help think of AI now that. How everything is being absorbed into this number, right? Even the self, maybe. So maybe the Matesis is now invading the self itself. Maybe I sound too apocalyptic. But I think your challenge in both projects of, you know, finding different ways to do matases which are less all about quantification is worthwhile when you think.
- [58:34]
David Albertson
Yeah, I think in a way, at the end of the last book and also in the conclusion, epilogue of this book. I'm not trying to be sanguine about technology or to promote it or I share all your concerns that you just outlined, but it's also a kind of saving of the phenomena. It's also a kind of recovery of a different possibility, one that we have to construct because it's not the world we live in. But at least we can see in these resources that 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. It was a way for them to understand the presence of God because of the measures of the cosmos. Right. So this would mean that in theory, there is sort of preserved in their way of seeing resources for us. Resources for us. When we see the reduction of natural forms to align, you know, in our sort of measurement of life in the world or reduction of our visual field to a series of intervals and planes and screens and kind of flattenings and reductions and measurements, that there could also be a different way of seeing. You know, to quote Plotinus, to wake to a different way of seeing.
- [60:06]
Interviewer/Colleague
Yeah. And I think the stakes are even higher because of the dangers of hyper virtualization and disembodiment. Right. That more and more of our experiences now, I mean. I mean, the danger of Gnosticism, the eternal danger is always there, right? That more and more of our experiences will be disembodied and virtual.
- [60:32]
David Albertson
Yes. Yeah, we have to. I mean, this is very speculative and I'm not even sure how to formulate this as an alternative to the way we experience the world. But what we would need is a way of not being forced to retreat from our technological measurements, because I don't think we can do that, but to work through those technological ways of seeing and being which themselves become a kind of icon. Right. Which themselves allow a way of visual drawing close to God's presence through them and not by simply sort of viewing them as only a way to escape the world in that sort of Gnosticism, like you said. Yeah.
- [61:22]
Interviewer/Colleague
Maybe your third book will elaborate more on. You're the one who can do it because you have this great quality of retrieving the resources and bringing them to bear on current questions. Right. In a very diligent way, but also perceptive to what is going on around us. And thank you for that, David.
- [61:50]
David Albertson
Well, thank you, my friend. That's a high compliment. And I really enjoy the conversation.
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Interviewer/Colleague
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