If we may fairly say that in the general character of an argument for the existence of God (as Thomas conceives of it) there converge the twin pressures of the knowability and the unknowability of God – of the cataphatic and the apophatic; and if, as we saw in the last chapter, those pressures converging in a rational proof but replicate the structural exigencies of faith itself; and if, more specifically, they replicate a certain sacramentally ‘mystical’ structure of faith, we must next, in this and the next two chapters, begin a more explicit exploration of how reason, in the exercise of its own native powers, in some way ‘replicates’ or ‘anticipates’ this shape of faith. But it will be clear from the outset that any such conception of reason will, in principle, run counter to those current within our own contemporary culture, whether formally philosophical, or more casually prevailing. For it is, it seems, a characteristic of many of our contemporary theological epistemologies that this delicately constructed tension between the apophatic and the cataphatic within both reason and faith has been readjusted into a polarity between the negat-ive possibilities of reason and the positive possibilities of faith. Among theologians the view which predominates therefore tends, by comparison with that of Thomas, to a generalised sceptical negativity concerning reason, combined with a theological positivism concerning faith.