The Bahá'í position on the knowability of God is thoroughly apophatic and it is the load-bearing move in the whole system. The divine essence is held to be unknowable not because human beings have not yet worked it out but because the gap between the uncreated and the created cannot be crossed from below — a created mind can no more grasp its creator than a painting can comprehend a painter. Bahá'u'lláh writes that every attempt to praise God is a description of the worshipper's own conception. The consequence is that Bahá'í theology contains almost no direct statements about God: what it discusses instead is the Manifestation, who is the only accessible point of contact, and everything predicated of God in prayer is understood as addressed through that mediation. This is why Bahá'í Houses of Worship contain no image, no altar, no representation of anything at all, and why the faith has produced very little speculative theology of the kind that occupied the Christian and Islamic traditions.