 Yet this vision of God is merely purported. Cusanus leads us through a series of reflections on seeing and on the face of God only to let us realize that, whatever ratio or discursive reason comes to realize, God is located beyond both imaginative exercise and conceptual understanding. Nicholas symbolizes our approach to this beyond by encouraging us to enter “into a certain secret and hidden silence wherein there is no knowledge or concept of a face,” characterizing it as an “obscuring mist, haze, darkness or ignorance.” (c.6) He invokes the coincidence of opposites from On Learned Ignorance and, in chapter 9 of The Vision of God, proposes his second central metaphor: the wall of paradise. God dwells inside this wall, and the wall also symbolizes the coincidence of opposites and thus the defeat of discursive reason and the principle of contradiction.