The Via Negativa: Knowing God by What He Isn't

There's a strand of theological thinking that has always appealed to me, precisely because it refuses easy comfort. It goes by several names, apophatic theology, negative theology, the via negativa, and its central claim is that God is so fundamentally different from anything in our experience that positive descriptions of God are not just incomplete but misleading. You can say what God is not. You cannot say what God is.

The tradition runs through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a fifth-century Syrian monk whose writings shaped medieval Christian mysticism; through Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher who argued that any positive attribute applied to God implies limitation; through Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic who pushed the logic so far that he was accused of heresy. The thread connects them: God transcends every category we have.

Maimonides makes the argument most clearly. When we say God is 'good,' we mean something like what we mean when we say a person is good, a quality, a property, something that could in principle be absent. But God, on the classical theist account, is simple, not composed of parts, not a being with properties that could be otherwise. To say God is good in the way a person is good is to misunderstand what God is. The most we can say is that God is not evil, not in the way created things can be evil.

This might sound like a way of saying nothing at all. But the via negativa has a positive function: it disciplines theological language, preventing the kind of anthropomorphism that turns God into a large, powerful human. The God of the via negativa is not a being among beings, not a person with preferences and moods, not someone you can flatter or bargain with. This is a more demanding conception of God, and I think a more honest one.

The mystical tradition takes this further. If God cannot be described, perhaps God can only be experienced, and the experience, by definition, cannot be communicated. Eckhart's sermons are full of paradoxes: God is a 'desert,' a 'nothingness,' a 'silent wilderness.' These aren't poetic flourishes. They're attempts to gesture at something that language cannot contain.

I find the via negativa compelling not because I'm certain it's correct, but because it takes seriously a problem that most religious language glosses over: the problem of talking about something that, by definition, exceeds our categories. The alternative, confident positive claims about God's intentions, preferences, and plans, seems to me to require a certainty that the evidence doesn't support.

There's also something intellectually honest about a tradition that says: we don't know, and the not-knowing is itself a form of knowledge. The silence at the end of the via negativa isn't emptiness. It's the recognition that some questions are bigger than the language we have to ask them with.