Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend ed. by Deal W. Hudson and Matthew J. Mancini (review)

BOOK REVIElWS most useful in this enterprise. They are to the human mind what creatures are to God, and in grasping the relation between the angle and the line from which it is generated, the mind might " see " into the relation between the creature and the creator who is its principle. The " daring dialectic of identity and unity " (Louis Dupre) which sees God both in and beyond all differences is the basis of Cusanus's program of theological deconstruction and religious reform. The two new additions to Cusanus's Opera Omnia make it clear that Nicholas was intent upon reestablishing the intelleotual link between the human and the divine, a connection which the mystical tradition had never lost. For complex historical reasons Cusanus's creative initiative never developed momentum in Christian culture even though it has exerted a perennial hut sporadic fascination. Today's developing interest in Cusanus's thought may stimulate some creative reappropriation of insights from this " road not taken " (Clyde L. Miller) . For the contemporary scholar these are simply excellent editions. The impressive adnotationes to the De beryllo offer an astonishing wealth of information on the sources and meanings of Cusanus's ideas. The present fascicle of Opuscula II presents the text of Cusanus's treatise " Tu quis es"-De Principia, perhaps a sermon, which deals with the knowledge of God as source and origin of being. While not among the most important of Cusanus's works it offers an unusual ex· ample of his theological method. These editions, especially the longer and more important De beryllo, are first-class examples of scholarly achievement and the publisher's arit. They live up to the perfeotionist standards we now expect in the Opera Omnia. La Salle University Philadelphia, PA JAMES E. BIECHLER Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Ed. By DEAL W. HUDSON and MATTHEW J. MANCINI. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987. Pp. xvii + 334. $39.95 (clothbound). In all [of his work] Maritain powerfully demonstrates the capacity for renewal which belongs to the philosophia perennis, and rthe scope of its application to contemporary problems. John MacQuarrie However time-conditioned Matthew Arnold is, he often "writ wiselier than he knew," and much of his work has a saving sense and reverberation a century after his death. (As usual, it was that 7~8 BOOK REVIEWS saintly sage and wit G. K. Chesterton who noted, in a 1906 Everyman Introduction to selections from Arnold's works, this quality and its unique, gracious combination of clarity and obscurity, of strength and weakness.) Thus Arnold could write well and truly, but half-heartedly and too lightly, of our modern deficiencies-" the disbelief in right reason, il:he dislike of authority." He could properly and eloquently and briefly define, and to large degree himself embody, culture itself: " the disinterested and active use of reading, reflection, and observation , in the endeavour to know the best that can be known " (Culture and Anarchy, 1868). But his own theism and Christianity were, like the " Sea of Faith " in his great poem " Dover Beach," on the ebb, with a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating." Yet in Arnold's conduct and ideal, the Christian leaven was still alive, as his phrasing so frequently shows. It can, I il:hink, be persuasively argued that two of his successors, Chesterton and Maritain, achieved Arnold's great cultural aims, but by reversing his direction, by recovering an awareness of the intelligible Being of God, the ens realissimum, the summum bonum, " the best that can be known " because it is the ultimate source of all goodness and being. Chesterton and Maritain recovered "right reason," the mean between irrationalism or fideism on :the one hand and endless, rootless, fruitless, relativistic rationalism on the other; they recovered a proper and rational attitude to authority, seeing in it our only safeguard against the anarchy or tyranny of mere present passion or power, alternative forms of the " universal wolf " perennially hungry to devour sane and humane living and being. Yet another of Arnold's brief but massively felicitous and wise phrases justifies Chesterton's high praise of him: Educated, reflective, and cultured persons ought to strive, he said, " to see life steadily and see life...