Via Negativapart i · on what cannot be said

The negative attributes of God are the true attributes; they do not include any incorrect notions or deficiencies regarding Him. Guide I:58

Maimonides wants to say nothing about God. Not because He is unknowable in some vague mystic register, but because every positive predicate, examined, is found to mislead. God is wise. What kind of wisdom? A wisdom that knows what it did not know yesterday, and may not know tomorrow? Acquired, exercised, sometimes mistaken? That cannot be His.

A careful philosopher might then say: a different kind of wisdom. A wisdom that bears the same name as ours but means something else. This is the move Maimonides refuses. If the wisdom is different in kind, then we are not predicating wise of Him in the same sense we predicate it of Solomon. The term is equivocal — it shares only the sound.

What can be said, then?

Two things remain. Attributes of action — to say He gives life is to describe what is done in the world, not what He is. And negations of privations — to say He lives is not the claim that He possesses life, but the denial that He is dead. He knows is the denial that He is ignorant. He is one, and now we feel the strangeness, is the denial that He is many.

A negation of attributes is the only true description of God that can be given to Him. Guide I:56

Each negation subtracts a false image; none furnishes a positive one. The reader is left, in the end, with less and less. And here Maimonides reaches the conclusion calmer philosophers fear:

Silence is praise to Thee.Psalm 65:2, quoted at Guide I:59

He cites the psalm not as poetry but as conclusion. The Sages, he says, knew what philosophers came to know more slowly: the only adequate statement about God is the one we refrain from making.

This is not anti-intellectualism

The negations are intellectual labour — to know precisely what cannot be said, one must know precisely what we would have said. The via negativa is hard-won. It is not the silence of the ignorant.

A reader might object: what then of prayer, of liturgy, of the daily blessings? Each is a positive statement. Maimonides' answer, threaded through I:59–60, is that the language of prayer is the language of action and of praise-in-the-mode-of-honour. It does not aim at description. The Avot speaks of God as the Great, the Mighty, the Awesome because Moses said so, and Moses said so because Israel must address Him. The philosopher knows what is happening: each adjective is an honorific, not an attribution.

The position is austere. Many of his contemporaries, Jewish and Muslim, found it cold. But it has a corresponding rigour: Maimonides will never make a positive claim about God's nature, never trade in mystical predication, never reach for a divine quality not authorised by negation or action. It is the price of avoiding idolatry of the intellect — the worship of one's own positive image of God.

What the thread connects to

The argument that God is absolutely one is the same argument: a God with parts would be a composite, a God-plus-attribute would be two things named once. That thread runs through The Unity That Is Not Number. The argument that scripture's anthropomorphisms must be read as homonyms — foot, hand, face — follows from the same conviction. That thread is Homonyms.

What remains is a kind of clarity. Not knowledge, but the disciplined refusal of false knowledge. The via negativa is what philosophy looks like when it has fully understood what it is for.