Through a clock darkly: the time of the eye in Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei

Abstract

At 5:15 p.m. (Central Daylight Time) on Friday, May 15, 2015, Jean-Luc Marion delivered the Morimichi Watanabe Lecture in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Before the audience, which included many members of the American Cusanus Society, Marion presented a phenomenological reading of the icon in Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei. When, in 1453, Cusanus sent this treatise to some monks at Tegernsee who were interested in the theory and practice of mystical theology, he included a ‘Veronica’ painting of the face of Jesus with all-seeing eyes. This was a fateful inclusion, insofar as the icon has become an object of such fascination that it risks eclipsing the text it was meant to supplement. As David Albertson has demonstrated, the debate surrounding this icon animates philosophical disputation even today. Marion’s phenomenological interpretation of iconicity can itself be framed in response to Emmanuel Falque’s claim that what is at stake in De visione Dei is not the theological category of the icon, but the much broader aesthetic field of painting.