  Following on the theme of God's unity, Maimonides emerges as a strong proponent of apophatic discourse, sometimes referred to as “negative theology,” which is a mode of talking about God with the sensitivity that, since God admits of no multiplicity, we cannot meaningfully (at least not in any straightforward or literal sense) ascribe any traits to Him. The very act of predication involved in attributions (formulas of the form “God is… ”) are doomed to failure in the light of God's utter unity. To approach God apophatically is, hence, to approach God with a heightened sensitivity to the failures of language to say very much about Him at all. This is called “negative theology” in the sense that claims about God (with the exception of such claims as “that He exists,” and “that He is pure being, pure goodness, and pure wisdom qua pure intellect”) are seen as never actually telling us anything substantive about God. At best we can come to understand what God is not. For example, Maimonides affirms that “anything that entails corporeality ought of necessity to be negated in reference to Him and that all affection likewise should be negated in reference to him” (G 1.55, P 128). For Maimonides, God “cannot have an affirmative attribute in any respect,” and so, affirmative predications about God cannot be taken as informing us about God's essential reality (G 1.58, P 135). As such, positive attributions about God actually bring one further away from—not closer to—an understanding of the divine: