Thread by @johnmilbank3

Speculative and very tentative thesis (comments welcome):1. The deep structure of Christian doctrine (Ericsmann) is ‘reciprocal realism’ of essences and things: seen regarding Adam and his sin/Trinity/Christology. 2. Medieval ‘realism’ derives from this (Ericsmann, Marenbon).

3. beyond Boethius Eriugena seems to extend this to Creator/Created relationship. He actually fuses Aristotelian universals schema with Platonic flux from Ideas schema. Does not keep these levels discrete only seems to (contra Ericsmann and Marenbon). Hence Uncreated/Created God.

4. Thierry of Chartres (influenced by Eriugena) then expresses this as enfolding in essence, unfolding in things on mathematical quadrivium models. Applied at levels of genera and species but also at level of emanation from God. 5. Cusa takes this over from Thierry.

6. In De Beryllo by Cusa we see how he still links this ‘reciprocal folding’ strongly to Aristotle besides Boethius. 7. But does this not imply Pantheism? 8. Only not because the Trinity is eminent unfolding. Thierry and Cusa sometimes make this clear but not always.

In both in fact God as Trinity is beyond complicatio/explicatio contrast. Thus SK etimes Nicholas indicates that the Son is j finite unfolding and Spirit union of complication and explication. Just as he says in De B that privation unites opposites of form and matter.

Sorry ‘sometimes’ and ‘infinite’

9. There is then for Thierry and Cusa no real pantheistic reciprocity between God and Creation. Complicatio In God as also explication is not dependent on or related to created explication. 10 Cusa like Eriugena resolves question of how ‘both’ God and Creation Christologically

So in Christ the divine complication/infinite explication coincides with a kind of transfinite perfect created explication that is Christ’s humanity. In this ultimate union of opposites as with Eriugena the Creation both is and is not God and the depth of God is this ‘God plus’

One could even say that neither acosmism nor pantheism are true and yet both are true if one thinks the entire logic of all of Christian doctrine and realism through to the end as truly only thinkers like Eriugena, Thierry and Cusa (there are others) do.

Cusa seems to think in De Beryllo that the ten Aristotelian categories are a version of the Pythagorean decad? How do we know that he was not right? After all, Aristotle says that substance is like number.