Lecture 13: The Incomprehensible and the Supernatural
impossible for the mind’s eye to see—the way that the sun is too bright to
look at. Intelligible means visible to the mind’s eye the way a mathematical
truth is when you say, “Aha! Now I see it!”Against this philosophical background, Nicene theology insisted that the
whole Trinity is incomprehensible. Nicene trinitarianism was hard for
Platonistically-minded Christians to accept because it rejected a hierarchy
of divine hypostases. However, Nicene theologians found the concept of
divine simplicity useful in explaining why the three hypostases of the Trinity
were necessarily one god, one eternity, one omnipotence, etc. Likewise, they
found the concept of divine incomprehensibility useful, applying it especially
to the eternal begetting of the Son. Since the Father is incomprehensible and
the Son is his equal, the Son must be equally incomprehensible, rather than
intelligible as in the Plotinian “trinity.” The upshot is that the whole Trinity
is incomprehensible, simple and one.The great theologian of divine incomprehensibility is the late 5th-century
Eastern Orthodox theologian known today as Pseudo-Dionysius, or
Denys. A Christian neo-Platonist, Dionysius clearly identi¿ ed the Trinity
as the incomprehensible divine One rather than the divine Mind. The
Trinity is simple, having no parts, containing no ideas or other beings. The
incomprehensible Trinity is a divine darkness, not because it is obscure in
itself but because, like the dazzling sun, it is too bright to look at.Dionysius contributes to the Eastern Orthodox tradition of apophatic
theology, which concerns how God cannot be spoken of. Called in the West
the via negativa (way of negation), apophatic theology (from the Greek term
for “negation” or “denial”) means speaking of God in his transcendence
by saying what he is not. To say God is incomprehensible is to say he is
not intelligible. To say he is eternal is to say he is not in time. To say he is
omnipotent is to say his power is not limited, etc.Nonetheless, there are indispensable af¿ rmations that must be made about
God. Since no language is adequate to describe the incomprehensible, God is
beyond negation as well as af¿ rmation. To speak well of God, both af¿ rmation
and negation are necessary as well as inadequate. Hence Dionysius also
writes a treatise On the Divine Names, explaining the af¿ rmative language