Esse est Deus: Meister Eckharts christologische Versöhnung von Philosophie und Religion und ihre Ursprünge in der Tradition des Abendlandes (review)

458 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 the metaphysics of efficient causality, this book provides a less than fully satisfactory account of the matters at issue.2 While this is a valuable, stimulating and very substantial book on a fascinating and important topic, the full story has not yet been told in all its historical and philosophical complexity. Moreover, the tale would benefit from a telling perhaps less enthusiastic and partisan and more philosophically critical of both Dionysius and Aquinas and their metaphysical perspectives. Technically the book is generally well-presented, despite some typographical errors (39, 4o, 138, 147, 167, 228, 245, 263, 274); it would have been much improved by the addition of a substantial index of topics and terms. RICHARD C. TAYLOR Marquette University Reiner Manstetten. Esse est Deus: Meister Eckharts christologische Vers6hnung von Philosophie und Religion und ihre Urspriinge in der Tradition des Abendlandes. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1993. Pp. 623. Cloth, DM 156.oo. Reiner Manstetten has done an enormous service to Eckhart scholarship by writing this comprehensive and original work on the great master. As the title suggests, Manstetten takes as his task an elucidation of the interrelation between Eckhart's philosophy and his theology, by showing the way in which Eckhart's thought as a whole may be seen as a response to ancient metaphysics on the one hand, and Judeo-Christian revelation and church dogma on the other. The book's length accordingly reflects the breadth of the themes treated, but is no doubt also due to the author's lucid style, which refuses to succumb to the paradoxical and contorted language which plagues so much of the secondary literature. Careful attention is given to both the Latin and the German works, and translations of all citations are provided. Manstetten rejects interpretations of Eckhart which view the scholastic language he often employs as a mere shell conveying a deeper mystical, transreligious content (Otto, Suzuki). Manstetten is equally critical of those who want to rescue Eckhart from the label of "mystic" and so shift the emphasis away from the religious-contemplative dimension of his thought in order to focus on the rational structure of his philosophical accomplishments (SchlOtermann, Flasch, Mojsisch). In contrast, Manstetten underscores the essential unity of Eckhart's religious and philosophical intentions, by demonstrating the way in which metaphysics, theology, liturgical praxis and spiritual contemplation are all fundamentally interwoven in Eckhart's thought. Manstetten thus takes as his point of departure Eckhart's metaphysical principle, "esse est deus" (existence is God). Part One is devoted to a first analysis of this principle. More than the intellectual act of identifying existence and being, the "est" in "esse est deus" signifies Christ as "See Michael B. Ewbank, "Remarks on Being in St. Thomas Aquinas's Expositio de divinis nominibus," AHDLMA 56 0989): 1~3-49, for an account along the lines indicated. BOOK REVIEWS 459 copula, a path from existence to God and vice-versa. This path may be traversed in turn by each of us in a process of transformation by which we, too, can become adopted sons of God, and so grasp all creatures in their being as God revealed (86). In Part Two, Manstetten focuses on the dual origins of Eckhart's ontology. He traces Eckhart's conceptions of substance and transformation to their roots in Aristotelian metaphysics on the one hand and in the Christian doctrines of consubstantiality and of transubstantiation on the other. An all too brief discussion (7 pages) of the notion of God as altogether beyond substance in the negative theology of Christian Neoplatonism follows. Part Three examines the way in which Eckhart rethinks the Aristotelian conception of substance and relation. If God is essentially undifferentiated how can there be a relationship between creature and GOd? Or between the three Persons of the Trinity? Manstetten shows how Eckhart conceives of divine relation in terms of analogical and univocal images. Only the Son of GOd is a perfect or univocal image of God, consubstantial with the Father. Creatures, insofar as they are thought of in themselves as this or that, refer only analogically, as mere signs, to their exemplar. It is in the Incarnation...