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

Nicholas of Cusa's De filiatione Dei (1445) was one of a series of brief works he authored just after finishing the longer De docta ignorantia and De conjecturis. This inspiring treatise provides Nicholas's considered reflections on the fourth Gospel's proclamation that those who believe in Christ have "power to be made sons of God." His proposals center around the idea that filiatio and deificatio are what the Greeks termed theosis. Nancy Hudson has revised her doctoral dissertation under the title of Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa as "an attempt to follow a single theme through the structure of his theology and philosophy" (9).

Hudson organizes her treatment of becoming God around three themes in as many successive chapters: theophany, transcendence, and theosis. These chapters parallel the Neoplatonic Christian framework of exitus-reditus familiar from the structure of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: created things flow from and manifest God (theophany), who always also abides beyond them (transcendence), and at the same time return to God (theosis). Hudson begins with an introductory chapter, sketching theosis in Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Pseudo-Dionysius, though she admits Nicholas had contact mostly with the works of Dionysius and only some acquaintance with Maximus. Her final chapter discusses the problem of "intellectual salvation" because De filiatione Dei underlines human intellectus as the site of the union of God and man.

Readers might be advised to address Hudson's final chapter about "intellectual salvation" first of all. This may help motivate her earlier chapters and provide some direction through them. What Hudson says on the issue should raise further questions about what Cusanus might mean by "pure intellectual life." He writes, for example, "Thereupon you, a son of Life, will be transformed into Life by means of being elevated beyond all comparative relations, all parallelisms, and all rational inferences — elevated unto pure intellectual life" (De Filiatione Dei III h71, Hopkins translation). "Pure intellectual life" as the vehicle for experiencing and becoming one with the divine presence is supposed to open a view of human intellection beyond reasoning or even understanding.

Throughout her book, Hudson invokes Jesus Christ as mediator and model of sonship, as did Nicholas. But this invocation raises many questions about Christ's exact function in theosis. Explaining how to integrate the Incarnation within a Christian Neoplatonic framework is not obvious or easy, nor was it for Nicholas himself, and his hints about Christ's function in human theosis remain quite schematic. In De filiatione Dei he tends to assert without explanation that our ascent to oneness with God via intellectual power can occur only as something we receive from God in and through the Divine Word. For more than hints about what sort of transformation of the human this amounts to and about what Christ contributes, we need to read extensively in Nicholas's sermons.

A strength of this book is that its chapters juxtapose quotations from Nicholas's works that are not often read together, and that each chapter lets us consider the theme of deification from a slightly different perspective — from above, beyond, and within, so to speak. A drawback is that Hudson sometimes assembles varied quotations from the Cusan corpus under subheadings in her chapters without explaining how they might fit together to explicate the theme or how they connect with De filiatione Dei. At intervals, too, her thinking through an idea wavers, or becomes snagged, on a digression. The result is that the relevance or import of a particular point within a chapter is not always clear. At least this reader had hoped, perhaps unrealistically, for more analysis of De filiatione Dei itself and of the Cusan sermons that address the topic of sonship and deification. (The many typos and inaccuracies in the Latin texts of Cusanus quoted in the footnotes are a recurring annoyance.)

Hudson's book has...