John Scottus Eriugena had knowledge of a number of Greek Patristic authors, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus Confessor, and sought to bring them into harmony with the Latin theological tradition (consensum machinari, as he put it). Forging this agreement was a broad intellectual program, demanding speculative ingenuity and subtle adjustments. This paper will address one strand in this rich web of connections, that is, the notion of divine infinity and its relation to the unknowability of God as it played out in Dionysius and Eriugena. Dionysius denied the logical view of affirmations and negations put forward by Aristotle, so that negations are to be viewed “not simply as the opposites of affirmations,” but as supra-logical and hyperphatic modes of discourse that suggest, but do not capture the divine incomprehensibility and ineffability (MT 1.2, DN 1.1, etc.). Among these hyperphatic terms were “infinity” (apeiria) and “infinite” (apeiros), which Dionysius used over thirty times. In his translations of the corpus dionysiacum, Eriugena had to make decisions about how to translate these texts, and, in his Periphyseon, needed to work out his own view of the relation of infinity and incomprehensibility. Deciphering the relation between these two thinkers on this issue is a complex task, as is evident from the observation that infinitas and related words appear 150 times in the Periphyseon.
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