“Everything that [the human being] and the world is bears traces of God, but, in the end, it never manifests him. There is a certain similarity, but it dissolves in an ever-greater dissimilarity. Everything points to God, but he is the Wholly Other, the Unknown… There is a via affirmativa, but it issues in the via negativa, in which we know and reverence God more profoundly, because we set aside all statements about him that do not describe him as he is. There cannot really be a third course, at all events not as a kind of synthesis of the two, in which knowledge by analogy —similarity in even greater dissimilarity—may be surpassed. It will be either the expression of the creature’s continued aspirations, ever unsatisfied, or else of the fact that God has revealed himself in a degree far beyond the possibilities of nature.”

Von Balthasar