Let us go into details. We can grasp the actuality of the absolute and infinite and incomprehensible, the essence and existence of God, only by means of conceptions borrowed from the world of our experience. No man has ever seen God. We have no immediate perception of the essence of God. Therefore we can know and describe God only by means of “alien species” (per species alienas), that is to say by means of concepts which originally denote created things, and which must first be purified of their creaturely imperfection and in their positive content infinitely intensified, before they can be used by us to represent the divine essence. So that no assertion that we make about God is an exhaustive assertion. It contains truth, but not the whole truth, and therefore possesses only an analogous value. We can speak of God only by comparisons (Wisdom xiii, 5). We are therefore aware that all our conceptions of God’s being lag infinitely behind the reality. All our names of God are but “shy gestures, which would gladly approach God nearer and yet can only greet him from afar.”[2]

But even God’s supernatural revelation, even all those truths which go beyond the data of nature and are directly taught us by divine revelation, especially through God’s revelation in His Son, do not enter our consciousness in their original nature and in their self-evident force and immediacy, but are mediated through human conceptions and notions. The dogmas, in which these supernatural truths have been authoritatively formulated by the Church, denote the Absolute, but are not themselves the Absolute. The conceptual forms in which they are stated belong to specific periods of time, being borrowed mostly from Greek philosophy, and express the supernatural truths truly and aptly and in a form intelligible in every age, but by no means exhaustively or perfectly. “We see now as in a mirror, in a dark manner.” Those words of St. Paul hold true of all supernatural knowledge.