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According to Joël’s study from 1906, natural philosophy, religious feeling or thinking and poetry are not separate cultural phenomena, but rather are interrelated. This contradicts the prevailing view around 1900 and so his work can be understood as an attempt to develop a new view of cultural horizons. Joël sees “feeling” and “mysticism” directed at nature as the main impulse. These two terms, which were completely shaped by the psychological ideas around 1900, cannot, however, come close to the life of early antiquity and obstruct the view of the novelty seen by Joël: the determination of a special cognitive disposition of a time that permeates all cultural phenomena.
Nicholas of Cusa’s “De genesi”, which begins as a commentary on the Book of Genesis, offers a reflection on the unfolding of the Divine into the world. It primarily considers how the One, the principium that sets and determines everything, can be a basis from which the Other (diversitas) and multiplicity can emerge. The pivotal point is identifying the “Self” that is God and what He transposes outside of Himself such that the transposed is also a “Self”. Thus, it addresses an old problem, directly linked to monotheistic thinking, which preoccupied Platonism and especially Plotinus. In fact, Cusanus takes up Neoplatonic lines of thought, but he transforms them with recourse to Trinitarian ideas. From Plotinus’s “returning” of the creature released by the One into the world to view the One and Divine, he develops the idea of a responding resemblance (assimilatio) to God on the part of the creature, which in turn is a “Self” but also an Other, which the creature in its process of resemblance “sublevates” in reference to God. This not yet fully thought-through or convincing concept leads to the more conclusive explanations given by Cusanus in later texts.