Via-negativa-positiva

Rupert Spira talks about the two terms via negativa and via positiva. The Via Positiva or Cataphatic Way describes God through positive statements. It assumes we can know and understand God by, for example, studying creation and revelation, through prayer and reflection, through self-enquiry or through religious experience. Statements we might make about God using the Via Positiva would be: God is love, God is justice, God is true, God is beauty, God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. The Via Negativa, or Apophatic Way - on the other hand assumes that our human language and understanding are incapable of describing the qualities of God and thus we are left with statements that describe what God is not (the negative way). So we might say: God is neither light nor darkness, God is neither knowable or unknowable, God is neither present or not present, and so on.