"Perhaps no word in common philosophical or theological use is more full of ambiguities than the word `nature', and, ergo, the word 'supernatural'. The supernatural may mean that which is above the created order of things. It may mean the spiritual as distinct from the physical. It may mean the miraculous, considered as an event outside the course of nature, produced by divine action. Popularly, it means ghosts. Ecclesiastically, it has been used to mean a sort of hypostasized grace conveyed by the church and sacraments. ...
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"Perhaps no word in common philosophical or theological use is more full of ambiguities than the word `nature', and, ergo, the word 'supernatural'. The supernatural may mean that which is above the created order of things. It may mean the spiritual as distinct from the physical. It may mean the miraculous, considered as an event outside the course of nature, produced by divine action. Popularly, it means ghosts. Ecclesiastically, it has been used to mean a sort of hypostasized grace conveyed by the church and sacraments. Here is confusion of every kind. Is not the word an impossible one? To the scientific mind it smacks of offence. It suggests the irrational. It is often argued that the emergence of this transparent notion is exactly what has triggered and buttressed philosophical meditation. It is evident that the urge to define the precise import of the supernatural, the overall effort to access and grasp it, motivates, influences and vitalizes philosophical meditation. Philosophy would be much poorer an occupation if it were not, more or less, marked by the transparent notion of the supernatural" (from the Preface by Th.N. Pelegrinis). The philosophical aporias about supernaturalism in the history of thought are the subject of this series of studies on Ancient Greece, Aristotle, Plotinus, Plato and Saint Paul, Islamic Law, Byzantine Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Arne Naess.
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