Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa by Nancy J. Hudson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 513 the author's intentions. Because he was a nobleman, Pico's life was well documented from before his birth, and immediately after his death his nephew Giovanni Francesco made him the subject of one of the first biographies of a contemporary. Borghesi's survey of the life, mentioning essential articles as it proceeds, opens the way to understanding Pico's career and writings without reducing the thinker to his life. Although announced as an invitation to studying Pico, this volume is not elementary in the usual sense. Unlike many introductions, it does not treat the intended audience as distractible groundlings who need to be flattered and tricked into reading philosophy. Instead, the authors address the intellectual ambition of their readers to understand problems in Pico's writings for which there is no professional consensus and then guide readers through evidence in the original texts, including Latin. Who is the intended audience, ready for philosophical arguments that they recognize to be inherently important? The academic affiliations of many of the contributors suggest that, besides other scholars, it is undergraduate and graduate students at Catholic colleges and universities who have the curiosity and preparation in classical and later philosophy and in Latin to follow the solutions of problems posed by a thinker about whom experts have not made up their minds. Pico is an excellent subject for such an approach, because he formulated challenging questions that provoke contemporary interest. Baltimore Hebrew University Baltimore, Maryland ARTHUR M. LESLEY Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa. By NANCY ]. HUDSON. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, Pp. 218. $59.85 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8132-1472-6. Becoming God is, in a sense, a search for the true identity of the fifteenthcentury writer Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). Is he at root a neo-Platonist philosopher or an orthodox Christian theologian? Is he properly cast as a medieval thinker or is he really an early modern figure? Can his philosophy of God be rescued from the charge of monism or is it irredeemably pantheist? Is he best depicted as a nominalist, a realist or something in between? Can his intensely paradoxical language be folded into the scholastic concept of the analogy between God and humanity? Nancy]. Hudson attempts to "untangle these and other questions raised by the ideas of this enigmatic figure" (8) by addressing the topic of theosis in Nicholas, convinced that "an examination of theosis, or becoming God, will help in the effort to correctly place Nicholas of 514 BOOK REVIEWS Cusa and his understanding of the creation-creature relationship" (1). In the end she concludes that Nicholas is an orthodox Christian thinker whose ideas are best evaluated against the backdrop of the Eastern theological tradition of Gregory ofNyssa, Maximus the Confessor and (preeminently) Pseudo-Dionysius. In a series of running skirmishes along the way, she also argues that Nicholas is fundamentally a medieval thinker (not an early modern) who adapted neoPlatonic categories in the service of a Christian theology. Though in dialogue with the Scholastics and sharing some features of the nominalists, he does not fit into either camp. For Hudson, Nicholas's Christocentric account ofreality charts a unique course between the Scholastic and nominalist options, and offers us important insights into the deification of both the world and humanity. The study begins (chap. 1) with a brief survey of three Eastern theologians, Gregory, Maximus and Pseudo-Dionysius, in order to display the characteristics of an Eastern account of deification that Hudson will later use to contextualize Cusa's own account. Nicholas's direct dependence on Pseudo-Dionysius is well established. Hudson suggests that (whether directly or indirectly) the influence of both Gregory and Maximus is also important for understanding Nicholas. Maximus's influence on Cusa's idea of the deification of the cosmos, and of the human being as microcosm, is quite plausible, and the link between Cusa's idea of "infinite progress" and Gregory of Nyssa is persuasive-this is plainly a view that can be traced back to him, though it could have been channeled to Nicholas through Maximus. With the Eastern Fathers as a backdrop, Hudson unfolds Nicholas's...