apophatic

From Ancient Greek ἀποφατικός (apophatikós, “negative”).

• (UK) IPA^(key): /apə(ʊ)ˈfatɪk/

apophatic (comparative more apophatic, superlative most apophatic)

1. (theology) Pertaining to knowledge of God obtained through negation rather than positive assertions.
   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 488:

     For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence.

   • 2009, Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Vintage, published 2010, page 123:

     Augustine had absorbed the underlying spirit of Greek apophatic theology, but the West did not develop a fully fledged spirituality of silence until the ninth century, when the writings of an unknown Greek author were translated into Latin and achieved near-canonical status in Europe.

2. (by extension) That passively defines a thing by describing what it is not characteristic of.
   • 2022, China Miéville, chapter 6, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:

     Here is a sudden interruption of remorseless, detailed exposition with a triple-punch of one-sentence paragraphs of self-indentification (2.1–2.4), and of an apophatic, negative kind, statements of what communists are not, have not, do not— […]

• cataphatic

• apophatically

• apophatism