The “super-intelligible” is a divine “place” marking the still-illusory character of the intelligible world.
In other words, the surintelligible denotes the Reality or Knowledge that surpasses what the human mind can reach, but to which it may sometimes assent through a wholly gratuitous grace.

More precisely

The surintelligible is not a higher level of the intelligible, but its beyond: an order in which all duality — subject/object, knower/known, knowledge/knower — is resolved in principial unity.
It is not an object of knowledge, but the principle of knowledge itself, anterior to any discursive or intuitive grasp.

The intelligible pertains to the intellect (intellectus), the faculty of participative knowledge;
the surintelligible belongs to the Unknowable, not as nothingness but as Plenitude beyond all determination.
Thus, it cannot be known, but only received, in a supra-noetic immediacy.

One may say that:
— the sensible is the object of perception;
— the intelligible, the object of intellectual intuition;
— the surintelligible, the object of non-knowledge (in the Cusan sense), or of gnosis as grace.

In several traditions, it corresponds to the Deity beyond Being — the supreme Principle, without name, without determination, beyond all objectification.
The surintelligible is not understood: it is attested, at times glimpsed, in a mode of union exceeding every mental operation.

Further reading

  • Plato, Republic VI–VII; Parmenides — the Good “beyond being.”
  • Plotinus, Enneads V–VI — the One beyond Intellect.
  • Proclus, Platonic Theology — hierarchy One / Intellect / Soul and surpassing of the intelligible.
  • Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology; Divine Names — apophasis and the “super-luminous darkness.”
  • Meister Eckhart, Sermons — the Deity beyond God and being.
  • Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia — non-knowing as way to the surintelligible.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.12 — vision of the divine essence and the limits of created powers.
  • Jean Borella, The Crisis of Religious Symbolism; The Sense of the Supernatural — intellect, intelligible, and opening to the surintelligible.
  • Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone — hierarchy of faculties (reason / intelligence / surintelligible).
  • Śaṅkara, Commentaries on the Upaniṣads — Parabrahman beyond all determination (neti neti).
  • Lao-tzu, Daodejing — the Dao that can be named is not the supreme Dao (apophatic dimension).
  • Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses — darkness as sign of the beyond-intelligible.
  • Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua — participation and deification beyond the logoi.