Paul Tillich

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

2. Isidore of Seville, circa 600

said that "God can be known correctly only when we deny that he can be known perfectly."

There is a story that as Augustine was writing On the Trinity, he saw a boy on a beach pouring seawater into a hole. Augustine asked him what he was doing. "I'm emptying the sea into this hole." "You should know you can't empty the sea into that small hole." "I have a better chance of emptying the sea than you have of explaining the Trinity."

The same point was made by Dante:

He is insane who dreams that he may learn
by mortal reasoning the boundless orbit
Three persons in One Substance fill and turn. (Purgatorio, Canto III, lines 34-36, John Ciardi's translation)

No one directly experiences God. The experience of God is always mediated — at least by our senses, imagination, and intelligence. In all the great monotheistic traditions, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, Aristotle's image resonates — humanity stands before God as the owl before the sun. God exceeds our capacity for understanding.

Thomas Aquinas gave three steps (the tres viae) in dealing with analogies in relation to God. The first is that every positive statement about God must be discounted. God is so different from the created universe that, for example, in the very act of affirming that God is good, we must deny that God is good in the sense that we know goodness from our own experience. In the Eastern Christian tradition, this is the core of apophatic ("negative&quot theology, which emphasizes the inadequacy of all attempts to describe the primordial mystery of God in human terms. Apophatic theology holds that knowledge of God is never purely intellectual, but mystical. This step is called the way of negation.

Aquinas' second step is that only after this negation is taken seriously are we in a position to make a statement based on the limited similarity that exists between creation and creator. Despite the enormous difference between God and us, it is true to say that God is good because there is a definite — albeit limited — common denominator between our goodness and God's goodness. This step is called the way of affirmation.

Aquinas' third step is to call on us to transcend the limitations of our human vocabulary to extrapolate from our experience of the finite to affirm God to the nth degree. This way of attributing perfection to God affirms them in an absolute way. This step is called the way of eminence.