Supernatural

===History of the concept===
The ancient world had no word that resembled "supernatural".<ref name="Oxford">{{cite web |title=Supernatural |url=https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100543199?rskey=wA4CHW&result=20|website=A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion|publisher=Oxford Reference Online – Oxford University Press |format=Online |quote=The ancients had no word for the supernatural any more than they had for nature.}}</ref> Dialogues from [[Neoplatonism|Neoplatonic philosophy]] in the third century AD contributed to the development of the concept the supernatural via [[Christian theology]] in later centuries.<ref name="Supernatural as a Western Category">{{Cite journal | doi=10.1525/eth.1977.5.1.02a00040|title = Supernatural as a Western Category| journal=Ethos| volume=5| pages=31–53|year = 1977|last1 = Saler|first1 = Benson|doi-access=free}}</ref> The term ''nature'' had existed since antiquity, with Latin authors like [[Augustine of Hippo|Augustine]] using the word and its cognates at least 600 times in ''[[The City of God|City of God]]''. In the medieval period, "nature" had ten different meanings and "natural" had eleven different meanings.<ref name="Bartlett">{{cite book |last1=Bartlett |first1=Robert |title=The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages |date=14 March 2008 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=d9O3PtKMPNsC&pg=PA1 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0521702553 |chapter=1. The Boundaries of the Supernatural |pages=1–34}}</ref> [[Peter Lombard]], a medieval scholastic in the 12th century, asked about causes that are beyond nature, in that how there could be causes that were God's alone. He used the term ''praeter naturam'' in his writings.<ref name="Bartlett" /> In the scholastic period, [[Thomas Aquinas]] classified miracles into three categories: "above nature", "beyond nature", and "against nature". In doing so, he sharpened the distinction between nature and miracles more than the early Church Fathers had done.<ref name="Bartlett" /> As a result, he had created a dichotomy of sorts of the natural and supernatural.<ref name="Supernatural as a Western Category"/> Though the phrase ''"supra naturam"'' was used since the 4th century AD, it was in the 1200s that Thomas Aquinas used the term ''"supernaturalis"'' and despite this, the term had to wait until the end of the medieval period before it became more popularly used.<ref name="Bartlett" /> The discussions on "nature" from the scholastic period were diverse and unsettled with some postulating that even miracles are natural and that natural magic was a natural part of the world.<ref name="Bartlett" />