Apophatic theology

Apophatic theology (from Ancient Greek: ἀπόφασις via ἀπόφημι apophēmi, meaning ""to deny""), also known as negative theology, via negativa or via negationis‍ (Latin for ""negative way"" or ""by way of denial""), is a type of theological thinking that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It stands in contrast to cataphatic theology.An example occurs in the assertion of the 9th-century theologian John Scotus Erigena: ""We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.""In brief, negative theology is an attempt to clarify religious experience and language about the Divine through discernment, gaining knowledge of 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 by the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.