Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings ed. by H. Lawrence Bond (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 637 is why this book is an exciting one, and to be recommended to anyone who takes the task of contemporary theology seriously. Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pennsylvania MICHAEL L. RAPOSA Nicholas of Gusa: Selected Spiritual Writings. Edited by H. LAWRENCE BOND. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997. Pp. xxi + 362. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0809136988. This book represents a major step forward in the introduction of Cusanus to English-speaking readers. Never before have the major spiritual writings of Nicholas been bound together in such a well-informed single volume. The book contains historical material, interpretive guides, and a brief glossary of terms that will be helpful to future first-time readers of Nicholas's works. Given the tenaciously neologistic style of Nicholas's philosophical Latin, no translation into English will leave all interpreters satisfied. In comparison to the most prolific and widely respected English translator, Jasper Hopkins, Bond's style is far less literal and more in accord with the fluidity of spoken English. Bond is wise to leave key terms like possest and posse itself untranslated. Ample footnotes offer variants and justifications in places in which Bond knows no single English rendering is definitive. Masculine personal pronouns which refer to God, however, are generally translated as "God," which is an anachronism introduced without explanation. Similarly, the rendering of homo as "human" and "human being" in the third, Christological book of On Learned Ignorance has the unintended consequence of making the uniqueness of the God-man's humanity into a more generic abstraction than Nicholas intended. Nicholas ofGusa also proffers a comprehensive mterpretation of Cusanus's life and thought on a scale that few Cusanus scholars have hazarded. Bond's general approach to Cusanus's thought is to see himself as part of an openended "quest for the historical Cusanus." He states: "[Cusanus] writes philosophy but more as therapeia and as cura animarum than as logica" (17). One could expect to leave a Scholastic disputation in the Middle Ages with a true proposition in hand, and this was no small accomplishment. Cusanus's style of writing, however, disavows this form of pedagogy. Bond therefore refers to Cusanus's philosophical and theological musings as a "ministry" carried out to heal the soul. 638 BOOK REVIEWS Another central (and more highly problematic) thesis of Bond's introduction is that Cusanus's philosophical position changed considerably in the course of his life. The philosophical notion of progress is a key element in reading Bond's Nicholas of Gusa. In his learned preface to the work, Morimichi Watanabe accurately notes that "this 'progressive' interpretation of Cusanus's views on God . . . began to be stressed only relatively recently by some Cusanus scholars" (xvii). Not only does a certain confidence in historical progress structure the introductory essay, but it presumably also guided the selection of texts and the decision to place them in a chronological order. Bond labels the first stage of Cusanus's writing career as "coincident theology" (1440). Inspired by a shipboard experience of divine illumination, Cusanus in this early period "views the coincidence of opposites as a revealed notion ... that may be characterized as ignorance, or better, sacred ignorance" (21). Recognizing the divine source helps to explain the meaning of coincidence. God grants Cusanus a vision of what it would mean to apply the mathematical notion of the infinite to theology. The infinite, by definition, precedes all plurality and differentiation (22). If at true infinity all differentiated, finite things are one, then the coincidence of opposites can serve as a method "that resolves contradictions without violating the integrity of the contrary elements and without diminishing the reality or the force of their contradiction" (22). This method is then applied to the three principal topics of On Learned Ignorance: God, the world, and Christ. In his treatment of On Learned Ignorance, Bond emphasizes that God, who is not himself the coincidence of opposites, is nonetheless thought as an absolute maximum in whom opposites coincide antecedently (24). Most creative in Bond's interpretation is his argument for a method of "coincident theology" which stands apart from the particular applications employed in On Learned Ignorance. This method will take into account crucial distinctions...