Apophatic

[Grogie]

I know that this is another rather specialized and uncommon word but it seemed very interesting. It refers to the technique of negating the existence of something invisible or almost inconceivable(such as God) in order to formulate a picture of it. I discovered this word earlier today. ''Some poetry is apophatic.''

[Perry]

Close, but no cigar. The invisible something is not negated. Rather one catalogs the definitions or descriptions that the thing is not.
Taken from Wikipedia

Apophatic theology - is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation, to speak of God only in terms of what may not be said about God.

In brief, the attempt is to gain and express knowledge of God by describing what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is. The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or learned thought and behavior.

In Negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized - that is, human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be false and conceptualization should be avoided:

E.g. In Jewish belief, God is defined as the Creator of the universe: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1); similarly, "I am God, I make all things" (Isaiah 44:24). God, as Creator, is by definition separate from the physical universe and thus exists outside of space and time. God is therefore absolutely different from anything else, and, as above, is in consequence held to be totally unknowable. It is for this reason that we cannot make any direct statements about God. (See Tzimtzum (צמצום): the notion that God "contracted" his infinite and indescribable essence in order to allow for a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist.)