Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa (review)

Students of the thought of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) know that he used the Greek term theosis and identified it with the Latin filiatio, becoming a "son." Nancy Hudson has given us in this volume a thoughtful, well-written study of what Cusanus meant by the term and how this enters into his thought on God and humanity. The book covers the Greek background of theosis and Nicholas's thought on the subject. Nor does Hudson ignore the relationship of the term to Cusanus's engagement with the negative theology of Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite. The book reveals facets of the inherent tension between the imminence and transcendence of God and their coming together in Nicholas's Christology, which is unusual among Western writers of his generation.

The book begins with an examination of the term theosis in the creation-centered theology of Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian fathers of the Eastern Church, and in the Christological thought of Maximus the Confessor, one of the greatest Byzantine theologians. Hudson does not try to explain Cusanus's access to these thinkers, and so she makes no mention of the Latin translation of Gregory's Life of Moses by George of Trebizond as a possible source of contact with the Cappadocian's thought. Hudson also looks at Pseudo Dionysius, giving a careful reading of that corpus, showing how the ascent to God is based on religious principles, not on philosophy.

Having established the background of theosis, Hudson comes to her theme via certain related ones, theophany and divine transcendence. These themes reflect Cusanus's effort to balance divine imminence in creation and the incarnation with a Dionysian sense of a God beyond the grasp of unaided human reason. The emphasis in the area of theophany is on God as, in Nicholas's terminology, not-other (non aliud). Creation participates in God without diminishing divinity or created reality. Hudson is careful to underline the difference between Cusanus's ideas of participation and monist doctrines that would de-emphasize the distinction between Creator and creation. This is not an entirely novel reading of Cusanus, but it is a useful reminder of what he meant by creation and how it related to the Creator.

The discussion of transcendence also touches on familiar themes, especially that of learned ignorance (docta ignorantia). Unaided reason (ratio) cannot attain to union with God. Nor does union annihilate the distinction between creature and Creator. The Creator is self-manifested, transforming mere ignorance into learned ignorance. Here we are shown how Cusan paradoxes and metaphors train human beings to transcend natural limits. A "simple" negative theology, emphasizing human limitations, gives way to "supereminence." Human reason is not a means of reaching God but a barrier that must be gotten over to attain such participation in God as is possible for the intellect. (Cusanus's discussion of "reason" and "intellect" in De coniecturis is fundamental to understanding this process of working not by Thomist analogies but by Cusan conjectures or surmises to attain such knowledge of the divine as is possible to humanity.)

The most important chapter in Hudson's book focuses on theosis itself. There the author draws a close connection between Christ, the single individual in whom God and humanity coincide in the hypostatic union, and the accessibility of God to humanity. Christ is not just the exemplar of the transformed believer but the means to transformation. The emphasis is not on affection but on the mind. (Here Hudson might has touched on Cusanus's letters to the monks at Tegernsee, which address the role of affection in mystical progress.) Christ is the means of participation in the divine, but not a conduit to absorption. Individual believers—and faith is essential to this process—are transformed but not annihilated. Rather the individual's identity is fulfilled through theosis.

Hudson addresses the issue of intellectual salvation in her final chapter. Here she is...