Rahner "favoured an apophatic way of speaking about God".

The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, edited by Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (Cambridge University Press, 2005) contains 18 excellent chapters on his work and a 19th which is Rahner's last talk before he died (1984). In it he describes four "experiences" he considered crucial to theological work. The first, which he clearly signals as the most important, he titles "Analogical Affirmations". It goes without saying, he argues, that for a Catholic theologian theological statements are analogical. This means that any thing affirmative we say about God must always be negated in some sense.
He says theologians too often make a formal bow to the incomprehensibility of God and then go forward with a confident affirmative discourse that effectively "forgets" that all our affirmations are under a cloud of radical inadequacy.
Rahner sees theology as a collegial work within the Christian community in response to God's self-communication in Jesus Christ: an intellectual work that engages the whole self (heart and mind) in moving towards a union that is totally beyond words. The negation that covers all our affirmative words (given to us by God in the first place) marks the place on the way where we stand before the Mystery and surrender all our human language and understanding to a judgement of inadequacy. The image here is not of a theology that is a closed system but of a theology that is a journey or way through the best that the human mind and heart can manage into the incomprehensible Mystery.

*the quote in the title is from the translators' introduction: C.C. p.297

*besides the negation that marks the point of passage away from language altogether,we need to write about the way negation appropriately enters constantly into the fabric of the theological discourse. More later