A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa.

An impressively productive Cusanus scholar, Jasper Hopkins offers this "miscellany" of four essays, four translations and two reviews. Those who expect to find Hopkins's usual long list of corrections and rejections of other recent scholars' works will certainly not be disappointed even though this book sets a more positive tone with valuable translations of De deo abscondito, De quaerendo deum, De filiatione dei, and De Genesi. Not readily available in English, these works form the heart of the present volume, making it essential to any academic library. Hopkins's translations are scrupulously done but suffer from distracting parenthetical terms and phrases that the author's Latin treated as simply understood. Seeming to dread any possible misunderstanding, Hopkins sacrifices stylistic fluidity. Similar sacrifices are noted in his earlier translations of Cusanus's work.

The introduction to the translations and their rich, 30-page section of notes mostly clarify and describe the texts rather than evaluate their significance. Thus, where Hopkins has a problem with Nicholas's terms "deificatio" and "theosis" for the state of ultimate perfection attainable by the human intellect, he merely asserts that such terms may be misleading, and does not suggest why Cusanus found such remarkable language useful or necessary. Not finding this language in earlier works of Cusanus which Hopkins studied and translated, one understandably looks for an explanation of this development. Instead of treating this suggestive language as innovative, and apparently convinced of the overall consistency of Cusanus's work, Hopkins bypasses the issue with the comment that the language "risks" misunderstanding. Cusanus's philosophical consistency is not convincingly defended, as Hopkins seems to believe, by Cusanus's own assertions of his consistency. When Cusanus introduces "risky" theological language, this is innovation and calls for explanatory analysis.

The best piece of work in this collection is chapter two, "The Role of pia interpretatio in Nicholas of Cusa's Hermeneutical Approach to the Koran." Hopkins wisely chose this hermeneutical principle as one of the most significant constructions of Cusanus's thought. In his Cribratio Alkorani (1460-61), Cusanus defined his notion of "devout interpretation" as an approach which admits "that the goal and intent of the book of the Koran is not only not to detract from God the Creator or from Christ . . . but also to give glory to God the Creator, to praise and to bear witness to Christ . . . and to confirm and to approve of the Testament and the Gospel" (51). Using this principle in his "scrutiny" of the Koran, Cusanus produced a work eminently more positive than those of his predecessors or contemporaries. Hopkins is thus not entirely wrong in criticizing Norman Daniel's Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960; 1966) where, toward the end of the book Cusanus is cited as an example of those thinkers who were heirs of earlier anti-Islamic polemic. Daniel clearly did not appreciate the significance of Cusanus's work. But then, the Cribratio Alkorani did not deeply influence Western thought. In chapter three, "Islam and the West: Ricoldo of Montecroce and Nicholas of Cusa," Hopkins analyzes the heavy literary dependence of Cusanus upon Ricoldo's Contra legem Sarracenorum and bitterly criticizes Daniel's treatment of Ricoldo.

Of the reviews, one is taken from volume 64 of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, devoted to Cusanus. Rejected by the German journal requesting it, it remains untranslated and should also have been rejected by Hopkins's American editor for its exclusive focus "upon putative inaccuracies in the several authors' articles" (ix). The other, hitherto unpublished, concerns Paul Sigmund's The Catholic Concordance (Cambridge, 1991). It consists, again, of a list of "putative inaccuracies" in the translation and so mars this miscellany.

JAMES E. BIECHLER La Salle University