Wittgenstein, in his early Tractatus, concludes his remarks with the proposition “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Many took him to mean that we can only speak of that for which there is empirical evidence or that which is simply tautological. If that were so, could we dare speak of God?

To be sure, what God is not — well, that’s a lot! But negative or apophatic theologians have plenty to say. Moses Maimonides, in The Guide for the Perplexed, writes of God that it’s a mistake “to hold that He has any positive attribute; however, the negative attributes are necessary to direct the mind to the truths which we must believe. When we say of this being, that it exists, we mean that its non-existence is impossible; it is living [means] it is not dead.”

Indeed, St. Thomas sometimes writes in an apophatic way. Almost at the beginning of the Summa Theologica, he tells us that “Because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not” (ST 1a, q. 3, Prologue).

Yet even to know the subject to which negative theology “gestures” requires that we have some idea, however imperfect, of God. That inchoate idea is already enough to give rise to a positive or cataphatic theology which approaches God affirmatively. Thus in the same question of the Summa Thomas turns from the apophatic to the cataphatic to tell us that God is His life and that in Him essence and existence are the same (ST I, q. 3, a. 3, 4).

Scripture, too, is apophatic. In denouncing idolatry, it tells us what God is not. But Scripture is cataphatic as well. In announcing the Good News, it tells us what God is and how we are to respond. John the Evangelist writes, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4: 9-10).

In speaking of God, our language and its logic are supple. We can avoid anthropomorphism or univocity, as well as the empty nominalism of equivocity. Only an anthropomorphic literalism insists that God the Father, a pure spirit, has a right hand at which the Son is seated. And it is a sorry equivocity to suggest that the “spirits” of Ancient Age Bourbon are “spiritual.”

Thomistic theology, in contrast, relies on the analogy of participation. What’s at work here? The eminent Thomist Norris Clarke presents it as combining the analogy of proper proportionality and the analogy of attribution. The former draws on the intrinsic similarity between the analogates, for instance, the similarity between God’s freedom and reason and our freedom and reason. (We are made in the image and likeness of God in that we are free and rational.) The latter draws on the causal participation of many analogates in one common source. (Every creature is brought into being through God’s agency.) Rightly used, Clarke writes, analogy can “hold together…in a single flexible term…both the similarity and difference we have discovered in things themselves.” The language of analogy allows us to approach the intelligible mystery of being.

And yet analogy remains, as it were, a seeing through a glass darkly. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church formally taught that “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude.” It is a sobering dogma. In this life we see by faith, a faith that is by no means blind but one that is duly chastened.