The Dionysius Areopagita’s way of negative in Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

Immaterial substances are not composed of sensitive matter, they do not start from beings; they are directly intelligible. Knowledge thus needs another way to apprehend them. Tomás, still in article 7 of question 84, seems to see this path from the thinker Dionísio Areopagita, who, when considering names for God, in his treatise Divine Names, listed the possibilities of knowledge for the human intellect before the first substance. There are three: knowledge because of, through eminence, surpassing or through denial or removal. In Dionysus, to know God negatively means to say that all that can be said about his nature is what He is not. Tomas expands the principle to immaterial substances in general and there is the possibility of transposing the theological mode of the Areopagite into a gnosiological mode, in which immaterial substances, understanding them as all that are immune to any change and movement of matter, assume a possible apophatic character and yet they can be affirmed as notions of understanding.