Previous article:   jmm.org.au/articles/26659.htm

On May 29, 1453 Ottoman armies led by Sultan Mehmed II brutally sacked the
city of Constantinople, the center of Eastern Christendom for over 1000
years. Many feared for the rest of Europe, and the threat to classical
culture, together with the possible disappearance of Christianity from
Europe.

Europeans had two options: organize a crusade (tried several times
previously with varying degrees of success) or engage in
dialogue, a response that was new and untested. The crusade option was
advocated by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405-64), later Pope Pius II.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), who later earned a cardinal’s hat, advocated
dialogue.

Today we face the same options – weapons or words.

The pope failed to get a crusade going (people accused him of wanting to
make war to ‘rake in gold’), but he wrote to Sultan Mehmed II urging him to
convert to the Christian faith (‘we are hostile to your actions, not to you.
As God commands, we love our enemies and we pray for our persecutors’). He
argued for the truth and superiority of the Christian faith against the
falsehood of Islam (which, he said was ‘not supported by reason… but
founded on pleasure and maintained by the sword’). And he rejected the idea
that the sultan worshipped ‘the same God as [Christians]’ because, as a
Muslim, Mehmed did not believe in the triunity of the one God. Pius II was
the last pope to attempt a crusade…

Nicholas, on the other hand, wrote a thesis titled ‘On the Harmonious Peace
of Religions’ (Latin De pace fidei). With his friend (Professor) John of
Segovia, he believed ‘war could never solve the issue between Christendom
and Islam’ and instead advocated calling a ‘conference’ between Christians
and Muslims, the goals of which would be ‘political as well as strictly
religious’. Idealistically, he envisaged a top-level dialogue in Jerusalem
where, after argument, deliberation, and persuasion, everybody would agree
to embrace a single faith. Nicholas asserted that all people, whether they
knew it or not, worship the one and only true God. He believed that the
Christian faith is the only true and most complete revelation of God, and
that all other religions – including Islam – were beset with error. But
error rests ultimately on ignorance, not on willful rejection of manifest
truth (as Plato taught). He also wrote to the sultan,and concluded the book
(A Sifting of the Qu’ran) with a prayer that God would grant
‘enlightenment’ to the mighty ruler.

Nicholas’s argument, briefly: 1. In  response to the Muslim denial that there are three divine ‘Persons’ Nicholas  tried to show that Christians are not affirming what Muslims are denying  (ie. that there are many gods); 2. What Muslims say about the one God  presupposes the kinds of beliefs Christians affirm about the Trinity. He  said Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Numbers such as ‘one’ and  ‘three’, according to Nicholas – leaning on the arguments of Augustine  (354-430) and Dionysius the Areopagite (6th century sometime) – do not  strictly apply to God. Numbers are for creatures: God is ‘beyond number’…  and, Nicholas asserts, the Qu’ran is not denying the authentic Christian  doctrine of the Trinity, but is rightly rejecting a bastardized version of
this doctrine (‘In the manner in which Arabs and Jews deny the Trinity,
assuredly it ought to be denied by all’. Everything Muslims reject in regard
to God as the Holy Trinity Christians reject as well).

Nicholas actually argued that the Trinity is presupposed in the Qu’ran. One
example: ‘Christ Jesus… was a Messenger of Allah, and His Word’ (Al Nisa’
4:171). Nicholas: If Christ was God’s Word, then he was God, not a second
God, but the one true God.

Nicholas believed that the battle between Christians and Muslims is to be
won by a battle of ideas, not the battle of swords.He’s not aiming for
compromise, but the resolution of competing truth claims. But this must be
done charitably, not belligerently. Nicholas was a mediator.

Luther, on the other hand, whom we meet in the next chapter, was a reformer,
‘fierce and unbending in defending what he believed to be true’…