Theologia Negationis: Maimonides and St. Thomas on Religious Language

Problems concerning religious language and knowledge have plagued philosophers and theologians perennially. If God is not a being but Being itself, not an object to be encountered empirically in the world in which we live—put crudely, one does not bump into God—and if all our knowledge arises in the context of our experience of finite empirical objects, what can one know or say about God? The radical distinction between God and creatures marked out within the Judaeo-Christian tradition by theologians like Thomas Aquinas can serve to raise more questions rather than to point toward any solutions of the problems of religious and theological language.The realization that we can know God only as the “beginning and end of all things” could perhaps lead to agnosticism, mysticism, or fideism, but (we might think) would hardly lead toward a rationally articulated discourse about God. It might well seem that all we can do when speaking of God is to deny of him the limitations pervasive in created reality. This paper will consider these issues in more detail.