“He who alone possesses immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light,
whom none among human beings has seen or can see,
to whom the honour and might of the Age; amen.”
1 Timothy 6:16
whom none among human beings has seen or can see,
to whom the honour and might of the Age; amen.”
1 Timothy 6:16
The 9th century Irishman – Johannes Scottus Eriugena left a timeless masterpiece called Periphysion, meaning 'On Nature' in Greek. The category of nature for Eriugena is defined as everything that is and is not. Basically, all of reality. The work divides this nature into four essential categories, related to the attribute of being, either creating or created.
1: that which creates and is not created – the cataphatic God, which gives rise to 2 and 3;
2: that which is created and creates – the primordial causes / Sophia - Logos / Platonic forms;
3: that which is created and does not create – the material world;
4: that which is not created and does not create – the apophatic God, to which everything returns.
What Eriugena insists throughout this work is that there is only God. There is nothing that is not God. God is the essence of all things. Like any good Neoplatonist, everything proceeds from God, the One, as an unfolding, but is then destined to return, like the exhale and inhale of the breath.
This got Eriugena accused of pantheism, or pandeism, or perhaps panentheism, but really his was a monistic theology firmly rooted in the Christian philosophical tradition.
For Eriugena, God is understood in a deeply apophatic way. We cannot know, say, or understand anything about what God is; in the apophasis of Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite (St Denys, to the Orthodox and here) God dwells in utter darkness:
"Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty."
(St Denys, The Mystical Theology, I, 1)
"Therefore the Divine Goodness which is called 'Nothing' for the reason that, beyond all things that are and that are not, it is found in no essence, descends from the negation of all essences into the affirmation of the essence of the whole universe; from itself into itself, as though from nothing into something, from non-essentiality into essentiality, from formlessness into innumerable forms and species. For its first progression into the primordial causes in which it is made is spoken of by Scripture as formless matter: matter because it is the beginning of the essence of things ; formless because it comes nearest to the formlessness of the Divine Wisdom.”
(Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, III, 681C, p308, O’Meara translation, Bellarmin & Dunbarton Oaks, 1987)
We can say that God is, but not what God is, because God isn't a 'something' at all. No category of genus or species, place or time, quality or quantity, or any other mode of existence, can be attributed to Him. Even 'being' itself is not fully appropriate, as God remains beyond 'being' and 'non-being'.
But God can be knowable to the intellect, and simultaneously unknowable, in the sense that we can make affirmative 'cataphatic' statements about God – such as used in Holy Scripture – and also negative 'apophatic' ones, without contradiction, moreover we can do so in a way that they complement each other.
