Billy asked:

What were Eriugena's comparisons on his different modes of theology: Affirmative, Negative, and
Superlative?

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When we use an expression like "God is [whatever]", we are making comparisons with created
nature. So to say, "God is wisdom [truth, goodness, beauty etc.]" is to make use of an affirmative
notion, as if God were somehow comparable to whatever notions we hold concerning wisdom,
goodness, etc. But these notions are not compatible with a Being that is not created, but infinite,
omniscient and the cause of all created things; accordingly such expression can never be more than
metaphors. Therefore, although it sounds paradoxical, it would be more appropriate to say, "God is
notwisdom (etc)", i.e. the negative mode, so as to leave God unenclosed in our created realm and to
acknowledge that a mere word, "wisdom (etc.)" is incapable of embracing an infinitude of predicates.
Erigena, who inherited most of this theology from such predecessors as the Pseudo-Dionysius and
Neoplatonists, then went on to examine whether adding the prefix "super" to our concepts of wisdom
(etc.) would occasion more than just a grammatical change. Since 'super' means 'beyond', it could be
argued that this usage meets both desiderata, e.g. to leave God's autonomy untouched while
retaining the convenience of talking about God's attributes in humanly intelligible terms.

For Erigena the crucial point in this debate is affirmative and negative senses are in essence just
verbal devices, both constrained by the experience we can have of wisdom (etc); accordingly the
superlative predication can be distinguished from both affirmative and negative mode in that the
copula "is" has, strictly speaking, no content — "super-wisdom" is not something conceivable to us.
Yet in its grammatical form, a statement like "God is super-wisdom" it is still of the affirmative variety.
But, Erigena counters, in its meaningit swings over to the negative, so that we are effectively
negating the positive denotation of the statement.

Erigena concludes in the end that the superlative usage effectively reconciles the affirmative and
negative senses and that something important may be learnt from this exercise in dialectics. What we
can learn is that God is, for "to be" is for God indicative of a transcendental state which is beyond
relation; and consequently what we cannot learn about God from our logical and verbal finessing is
what God is, for this would require us to set him into a relation to what we already know.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney