used of God, such as Supreme Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Justice,
etc. Using language that goes back to Plato, Dionysius says that God is
not only beyond intelligibility but beyond being, literally “above essence”
(hyper-ousios) or “super-essential.” Particularly inÀ uential is his description
of God as “the Good that diffuses itself.”
In contrast to Dionysius, Augustine, the great Christian neo Platonist of the
West, conceived God as intelligible. For Augustine, the human mind is like
an eye made to see the light of divine Truth. God is the Truth that contains all
that is immutably true, the Mind containing Plato’s Ideas. Therefore every
time the intellect sees the truth, it catches a partial and transitory glimpse
of God. God is to be understood by the intellect,
just as bodies are to be seen by the eyes. To use
later terminology, for Augustine, it is natural for
the human mind to see God.
When Augustine says God is incomprehensible,
he means something much less than Dionysius.
Like Dionysius, Augustine frequently uses the
metaphor of dazzled eyes to describe how God
surpasses our understanding. But for Augustine,
this dazzlement is due not to the incapacity of
our nature to understand the incomprehensible
God, but to the sinfulness of our hearts which corrupts our minds. It is as if
our eyes are unhealthy and half blind. Grace, for Augustine, serves to heal,
purify, and strengthen our minds so that we may see God. The sense in which
God remains incomprehensible even to healthy eyes is parallel to the sense
in which bodies cannot be seen from all sides at once.
The concept of the supernatural arose when Western theologians in the
Middle Ages had to reconcile Augustine and Dionysius. Their problem was
to explain how there can be a beati¿ c vision of an incomprehensible God.
For Augustine, the ultimate goal of life is the ful¿ llment of the mind’s desire
to see God, ¿ nding rest in God and “joy in the Truth.” Dionysius’s doctrine
of incomprehensibility, on the other hand, means that the essence of God is
beyond the capacity of any created being to see or understand.
The concept of the
supernatural arose
when Western
theologians in the
Middle Ages had to
reconcile Augustine
and Dionysius.