Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance ed. by Peter J. Casarella (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 329 canon law cannot entirely encompass. Does not ancient tradition recognize the possibility of heretical popes? Constantinople III's condemnation of Honorius, however mistaken, was accepted by Leo II and Hadrian IL Believers accept Christ mediated by the Church, his Body, which includes the magisterium as an essential component for transmitting revealed truths. Since revelation culminates in Jesus, whose full reality cannot be encapsulated in propositions (cf. John 20:25; Col 2:3), difficulties in explicating his mystery may arise. A living authoritative witness to truth guarantees its translation into human language lest faith's demands for total adherence be diminished; the magisterium's conceptual formulations, while not exhaustive, must be true. Our current crisis concerns theologians' inability to ground objectively any statement whatever. Their Neoplatonic alleged encounters with absolute mystery devolve into unrestricted pluralism. Today the papal magisterium maintains the sanity of tradition, refusing to submit faith's content to any theological method, especially a transcendental philosophy which undermines its foundations by relativizing all finite intelligibility. Even if Cardinal Dulles leaves untreated metaphysical difficulties about finite words' capacity to express permanently the mystery of God incarnate, his sanity recommends itself, and his volume serves as a foundational text reflecting Catholic tradition. Dulles's book is preferred to Lucien's more radical proposal. Admittedly Dulles refrains from considering historical difficulties, though acknowledging that a "heretical, schismatic, demented or coerced [pope] ... could not exercise his teaching authority" (72). But a manual cannot do everything and a good one leaves room for classroom expansion. On one point Dulles might be mistaken: the problem of reception affects the earlier, not the later, sessions of Constance (105). Two typographical errors pop up: Acts 20:30 instead of Eph. (18) and "proem. 5" instead of 6 in Hippolytus's Philosophumena (23). Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan JOHN M. MCDERMOTT, S.J. Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance. Edited by PETER J. CASARELLA. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. 280. $74.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-1426-2. The six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa in 2001 occasioned conferences around the world, from Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic to Argentina and Japan. The present volume contains papers from a conference held in 2001 at The Catholic University of America. The papers take in hand large, not microscopic, topics, 330 BOOK REVIEWS and they draw by design primarily on Cusanus's first major work of philosophical-theological spirituality, his De docta ignorantia, as well as its restatement in "spirituality" terms in De visione Dei. As Peter Casarella's fine introduction notes, Cusanus interpretation has moved away from reading him primarily as a precocious forerunner of German idealism (Ernst Cassirer, 1927) or of modernity in general, toward a more nuanced understanding of him as both a child of his times and a hard-to-define unicum. This collection continues that trend. Almost all the essays explicitly or implicitly address the "forerunner" issue, and their varied conclusions suggest that the matter has certainly not yet been laid to rest. In Casarella's view, Cusanus can now be better understood as a "cartographer of uncharted spaces" of his own century (xxvi). He surveys truth as a moving image (ibid.) and shows "healthy skepticism about the real" without reducing it to a nihilism of "merely perspectival showing." One might, at this juncture, ask if a healthy skepticism about the real is not already present in most medieval authors, who were aware that even their highest "intelligentia" remained something of an "explanatory model" rather than a true knowledge of the Real. Man as Deus humanatus (God manque in Jasper Hopkins's terms) encapsulates Cusa's vision of man as creative artist, expressed in terms of wonder and beauty (xxviii). Nancy Hudson and Frank Tobin ("Nicholas of Cusa's Sermon on the Pater Noster" [l-25]), offer an English translation of the sermon by Tobin and a brief introduction by Hudson, who argues that the sermon shows how Cusanus employed some of his characteristic "high" philosophical and theological ideas (participation in the kingdom of God, divine immanence, sin as alienation from God, creatures as living...