apophatic

English edit

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

apophatic (comparative more apophatic, superlative most apophatic)

(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.
(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— […]

pertaining to knowledge of God obtained through negation rather than positive assertions