The Incomprehensible and the Supernatural ...................................

Lecture 13

We’re going to start looking at medieval developments of concepts,

ideas, and doctrines that have their roots all the way back in the New

Testament that were developed by the church fathers, but then are

developed further and take on new forms and new problems and issues

and interests in the medieval period.

T

he orthodox Christian theological tradition became committed to the
doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God as a consequence of the
Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. For Nicene theologians, the eternal
begetting of the Son by the Father is ineffable and incomprehensible, not to
be understood in terms of anything in creation. This developed into a strong
doctrine of the incomprehensibility of the Trinity itself, which had important
theological consequences. These consequences played out differently in the
East than in the West. The Eastern churches, including the Eastern Orthodox,
are theological descendents of the Greek-speaking churches of the Eastern
half of the Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire. The
Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are theological descendents
of the Latin-speaking church of the western half of the Roman Empire.
Theologically, the most important difference between the two is the massive
inÀ uence of Augustine in the West, which had no parallel in the East.

To insist on the incomprehensibility of God had de¿ nite consequences in
the Platonist philosophical environment of ancient Christianity. Plotinus,
the pagan neo-Platonist, made a sharp distinction between divine
incomprehensibility and intelligibility. He spoke of a hierarchy of three
divine hypostases: One, Mind, and Soul. Soul means the divine Soul of all
things, which is lower than the other two because it is connected to bodies.
The Mind is lower than the One, because Mind contains many Ideas, which
makes mind both manifold and intelligible, something “visible” to the
mind’s eye. The divine Mind is “eternally generated” from the One. The
One is not intelligible but incomprehensible, and not manifold but simple.
“Simple” means not having parts or multiplicity of any kind, not composite
or made up of anything. Incomprehensible means beyond intelligibility,