What Is Positive in Negative Theology?

Abstract

Does the negative theology inspired by thoughts of God’s transcendence reduce to vacuity, leaving only atheism or agnosticism as its residue? Maimonides helps us frame an answer. The “lexicon” of biblical anthropomorphisms he surveys in the first seventy chapters of the Guide to the Perplexed prepare one for the discipline of apophatic theology by mapping an ontological, axiological, and epistemological hierarchy oriented by an axis stretching away from physicality and toward the intellectual and ever more real. God surmounts its summit. We enrich our grasp of God’s infinite perfection as our appreciation grows of the myriad ways in which perfection shows itself in nature. So broader experience can give content to our thoughts of God’s absoluteness and guide us in pursuit of a perfection of our own. Reaching beyond Maimonides’ hylomorphic axis of perfection, the Chapter 6 seeks to bring matter itself in from the cold.