Theologia Negationis: Maimonides and St. Thomas on Religious Language

Problems concerning religious language and knowledge have plaguedphilosophers and theologians perennially. if god is not a being but beingitself, not an object to be encountered empirically in the world in which welive—put crudely, one does not bump into god—and if all our knowledgearises in the context of our experience of finite empirical objects, what canone know or say about god? the radical distinction between god andcreatures marked out within the judaeo-christian tradition by theologians likethomas aquinas can serve to raise more questions rather than to pointtoward any solutions of the problems of religious and theologicallanguage.the realization that we can know god only as the “beginningand end of all things” could perhaps lead to agnosticism, mysticism,or fideism, but (we might think) would hardly lead toward a rationallyarticulated discourse about god. it might well seem that all we can dowhen speaking of god is to deny of him the limitations pervasive increated reality. this paper will consider these issues in more detail.