Folia Theologica 16. (2005)

Pál Bolberitz: The Beginnings of Hungarian Philosphy (The Reception of Nicholas of Cusa in the work of "De homine" by Peter Monedulatus Csokas Laskoi)

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P. BOLBERITZ

the soul, it - according to the renaissance tendency, making a cult of nature and human living - considers human body well-made, perfect, in which he admires the Divine wisdom.

Peter Csókás Laskoi starts from admiring, and the ancient classic- according mainly to the Platonic and Neo-Platonic sources of him- admiring is regarded the starting point of the philosophical reflection in his conception. First he writes about the universe and calls it macrocosmos. Though to this great world corresponds - like in reflection by mirror - a smaller world, and this the microcosmos. The smaller world seems to be the image of the great world, while the great world seems to be the semblance of the "greatest". There is no similar to the greatest, that is God, except of God, Himself. All knowledge, especially the knowledge of nature derives from admiring this threefold world - which is compared by our author to the threefold division of the saint tabernacle of Moses27. According to Aristotle 28 human mind had been emerged from this admiring in order to investigate and analyse causes. The threefold world reveals God for human mind on each level of it. Peter Laskoi Csókás refuses Anaxagoras' conception, according to which man is authorised only to the passive observation of the world29. Just on the contrary: on the base of Aristotle, Laskoi accepts, too, that intellectual cognition is attained through the perceptional cognition, which leads us to the acquiring of the existence of God, the mistery of whom is explored by the biblical revelation. Laskoi - referring to the Bible - declares that the mistery of God must not be explored by man.30

27 Cp. LASKAi, De homine, Book One. Chapter I. The Mosaic saint tabernacle, where the sacrifice was offered before constructing the Church of Jerusalem. [See the Description in Moses’ Book II, 35-38],

28 According to the view of Aristoteles the starting point of philosophy is the activity of admiring. Laskai accepted the concept of Aristoteles. Cp. „De homine ”, Book One, Chapter 2, p. 24.

29 Laskoi refuses the view of the presocratic Anaxagoras. Man does not only admire the miracles of the world, but his cognition - as Aristoteles and Thomas Aquinatis teach — derives from the percepting experience, and formulates the universal concepts through several stages of rational abstraelion.

30 The Protestant theology - especially in the beginning - was against philosophy (which can be regarded acceptable, since Luther - as a biblical theologist - did not show any respect to the conceptual captiousness of the late scholasticism. Kálvin (as a lawyer, and not as a philosopher, became a theologist) as-