Il "Pneuma" nel De pace fidei di Niccolò Cusano

This essay investigates the conceptual figure of the spiritus conexionis in Nicholas of Cusa's De pace fidei. The thesis is that the German thinker, by radicalizing the scope of the traditional use of that figure, which originally belonged to the doctrine of the Trinity and to the Neo-Platonic conception of the anima mundi, in this work confers to it a pneumatological-political characterization. Indeed, at the end of De pace fidei, from the spiritus conexionis descends to the individual representatives of the cultures and religions the potestas necessary to establish in Jerusalem the only true faith, guaranteeing the tolerance of the diversity of rites. As in the Trinity and in the Universe the spiritus conexionis binds the various parties and thereby causes that they are also possible in their singularity, so, in the political realm, the spiritus conexionis is the category in which, after the medieval ordo, the diversity of individual nationes is held together, made possible and founded in their individuality within a larger connection. The name of this union, not spelt out and only sketched by Nicholas, is: Europe.