This panel engages with David Albertson’s The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure(Oxford, 2025), a study that explores the intersection of mystical theology, mathematical imagination, and the conceptual frameworks of Christian contemplative practice. Albertson argues that Christian contemplation can be understood through a logic of ‘measure without measure,’ in which the disciplined structures of the mind and imagination allow for encounters with the infinite, the ineffable, and the divine. Drawing on historical sources from patristic, medieval, and early modern authors, the book examines how geometric, proportional, and formal analogies mediate the relationship between human cognition and divine transcendence. Papers in this panel engage concepts key to Albertson’s work, including historical investigations of geometric or numerical metaphors in Christian spirituality; philosophical or theological analyses of measure, proportion, and the infinite.
This paper maps Albertson’s “measure without measure” onto synodal preaching at the Council of Basel (1431–1449). Feast-day sermons to the general assembly used geometric, proportional, and formal analogies as more than rhetorical flourish: they served as disciplined structures of mind and imagination, mediating encounters with divine transcendence. Three Basel case studies extend Albertson’s argument. Two sermons by a Cistercian present a macro-scale pedagogy in which ordered time and cosmology trained cognition through the intelligibility of creation, while an anonymous sermon on the Conversion of Paul supplies a micro-scale hinge, describing the inexhaustible complexity of an atom. Lastly, a Corpus Christi sermon treats the Eucharist as a “surface” where finite elements meet infinite realities.
| David Albertson | dalberts@usc.edu | View |