Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia XI/1: De Beryllo ed. by Hans Gerhard Senger and Karl Bormann, and: Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia X/2b: Opuscula II, Fasciculus 2b ed. by Karl Bormann and Heide Dorothea Riemann (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 7fl5 we know or hope and what may our ethical commitment be? Confidently Caputo believes that reason is not destroyed by ,the loss of meta· physics hut liberated. He proposes an ethics of dissemination, an ethics that insists that all institutions are partly the buildings of prudence and partly power politics, and hopes that this will help to keep people honest. Radical hermeneutics leads us to the groundlessness of the mystery and refuses to allow metaphysics to control that mystery. Near the end of his book Caputo goes back to Meister Eckahrt's re· flections about God. The German mystic wanted us to reach the sheer transcendence of God beyond our words about God. Thus there would the soul be chastened and achieve a new sense of the mystery of God. Caputo compares rthis to the result of radical hermeneutics: at the end there is something like the ground or deep part of the mind or soul. Caputo's study is stunning in its scope and scholarship. How many are ready to go as far as Caputo does and to surrender as much as he surrenders? Few, I suspect. Though aputo finds that radical her· meneutics leads to a new freedom, this reader was not convinced by Caputo's concluding seotions-largely because of difficulty in under· standing why precisely Caputo was so hopeful. In desiring that Caputo he more clear in his defense of radical hermeneutics I may he asking for what is impossible if one accepts radical hermeneutics. I do think that readers who are ready to follow rthis exceptionally gifted philosopher in his argumentation should benefitt greatly from both Caputo's insights and his learning, even if they cannot be as enthusiastic as the University of Villanova Professor is for the possibilities offered by radical hermeneutics. St. John's University Jamaica, New York ROBERT E. LAUDER Nicolai de Gusa Opera Omnia XI/1: De Beryllo. Ed. by HANS GER· HARD SENGER and KARL BORMANN. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Ver· lag,, 1988. Pp. 148. DM 160. Nicolai de Gusa Opera Omnia X/2b: Opuscula II, Fasciculus 2b. Ed. by KARL BORMANN and HEIDE DOROTHEA RIEMANN. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988. Pp. 88. DM. 98. Nothing so grand as the present series of volumes making up the Opera Omnia of Nicholas of Cusa was envisioned by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences when it set about in 1927 to produce a critical edition of the fifteen-century cardinal's philosophical and political wri· 7~6 BOOK REVIEWS ings. Over 17 volumes have now appeared and they span the entirety. of Cusanus's intellectual output from his sermons to his mathematical writings, from philosophy to astronomy and calendar reform, from scientific experiment to theology. The very range of his interests is stunning , and when it is seen coupled with the depth and passion of his theological vision ithe impression is unforgettable. As the critical editions make the works of Cusanus accessible to scholars, interest in his thought develops apace. And .this interest is global, as the existence of a Japanese Cusanus society attests! The reason for the interest is not difficult to grasp. No other thinker of his time was as poised on the brink of modern thought as was Cusanus. Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Hegel show evidence of his influence, as do Kepler and Giordano Bruno. In the view of Ernst Cassirer " Cusanus is the only thinker of the period to look at all of the fundamental problems of his time from the point of view of one principle through which he masters them all. His thought knows no barriers that separate disciplines. In keeping with the medieval ideal of the whole, it includes the totality of the spiritual and physical cosmos " (The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, p. 7). Whenever the name of Nicholas of Cusa is mentioned, the ideas which come most readily to mind are the notions of docta ignorantia and coincidentia oppositorum. " Learned ignorance " is itself a " coincidence of opposites " and for Nicholas it expressed the essential reality of the human condition. The human person is by nature a knower, ordered essentially to truth, yet constitutionally incapable of grasping that truth as it...