Apophatic is an adjective meaning "involving a mention of something one feigns to deny; involving knowledge obtained by negation." It is almost exclusively used to describe theological and philosophical concepts.
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach the divine by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is the divine's characteristic. It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches the divine by affirmations or positive statements about what the divine is. The root Greek word for cataphatic means "affirmation."
Though apophatic and cataphatic are words coined in the mid-19th century, the concepts are as old as philosophy itself. Elements of both may be found in Plato's doctrines and throughout philosophical and theological history.
--Mike Nichols
Apophatic
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