Nicholas of Cusa’s celebrated merging of logic and mystical language with Christian philosophy and biblical exegesis reached a high point in his reflections on Christ as Mediator. Within that major theme, Nicholas developed the images of the Good Shepherd and Gate of the Sheepfold from John 10, 1-7 into ideal symbols to express the doctrine of Christ as the living link between God and all creation: transcendent and immanent, enfolding and unfolding, and simultaneous entrance and exit. Dionysian concepts of hierarchy and illumination, well attested throughout Nicholas’s philosophical writings, also play a role in his reflections on the Good Shepherd. It is useful to view them in the homiletic tradition, especially among sermons that go beyond moral and political uses of the Good Shepherd images to consider what they reveal about divine ontology. That the Good Shepherd was on Nicholas’s mind especially during his fruitful tenure as Bishop of Brixen (1452-58) is evident from his many references in sermons given throughout the year’s cycle and not only on the Second Sunday after Easter, when the Good Shepherd is the gospel lection. This essay broadens the context of Nicholas’s adaptation of the Good Shepherd images, adding to recent expositions of the Brixen sermons in a reform context that rightly point to Nicholas’s reconciliation of authoritative and speculative notions of reform. That is another of Nicholas’s mergings, a movement that Nicholas’s predecessors had made around this same Good Shepherd passage.
Keywords: Cusano, Sermons and Preaching, Biblical Exegesis, Good Shepherd, Neoplatonism
