David Williams has recently argued that medieval representations of the monstergive humans an image of divinity, but one which can never be totally understoodor described. Positive theology, the via positiva, attempts to take what is known ofdivinity and then to derive more precise statements about the nature of God; itattempts to contain God in human thought and language. The via negativa, by contrast,forces humans to discard the idea of any positive knowledge about God,since reason and language are inadequate to the task of containing or describing abeing so totally other to humans. Alexander the Great, the narrator of the OldEnglish Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, experiences such a negation in his campaignin India; he attempts to describe the wondrous beings and races which he encounterswith his army, and his narrative of conquest functions as a metaphor for containingthe encountered world in thought, description and mental order. However,he is resisted at every turn by natives, monsters and classical divinities; he is forcedto realize that his reason and his force are incapable of containing divine power asmanifested in the natural world of India.