“Everything that [the human being] and the world is bears tra-ces of God, but, in the end, it never manifests him. There is a certain similarity, but it disso-lves in an ever-greater dissimilarity. Everyth-ing points to God, but he is the Wholly Other, the Unknown… There is a via affirmativa, but it issues in the via ne-gativa, 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 ex-pression of the creat-ure’s continued aspira-tions, ever unsatisfied, or else of the fact that God has revealed him-self in a degree far beyond the possibilities of nature.”
- Von Balthasar
