In his Gifford Lectures Donald MacKinnon says that ‘No modern philosopher raises more acutely than Kant the problems of the representation of the unrepresentable.’ A similar judgement might, I think, be applied to his own work. For few modern philosophers and theologians have been more concerned with the variety of ways in which we attempt to represent what transcends us, while yet insisting on its transcendence, than MacKinnon. In those lectures, echoing Wittgenstein, he describes the metaphysician as ‘thrusting against the limits of language’ and as one who

He compares the metaphysician's task to that of a painter, as described by Cézanne in his letters. And indeed the words just quoted remind me of another painter: not Cézanne, but the aboriginal Alf Dubbs, in Patrick White's novel Riders of the Chariot, who struggles to express something of his religious vision on canvas.

The problem of metaphysics, for MacKinnon, is not just the difficulty of uttering, but the inevitable inadequacy of what is uttered. In the case of God, our attempts to represent Him run the risk of anthropomorphism, which he describes as ‘the intellectual counterpart of the sin of idolatry’ (ibid., p. 15).