Negative Theology (What God Is Not) - Definition

Negative Theology (What God Is Not) - Definition: Also known as Via Negativa (Negative Way) and Apophatic theology, negative theology is a Christian theological system that attempts to describe the nature of God by focusing on what God is not rather than on what God is. The basic premise of negative theology is that God is so far beyond human understanding and experience that the only hope we have of getting close to the nature of God is to list what God definitely is not.

The basic methodology of negative theology is to replace traditional positive statements about what God is with negative statements about what God is not. Instead of saying that God is One, God should be described as not existing as multiple entities. Instead of saying that God is good, one should say that God commits or allows no evil. More common aspects of negative theology that appear in more traditional theological formulations include saying that God is uncreated, infinite, indivisible, invisible, and ineffable.

Although it originated in a Christian context, it can also be found in other religious systems. Muslims, for example, may make a point of saying that God is unbegotten, a specific refutation of the Christian belief that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus. Negative theology also played a crucial role in the writings of many Jewish philosophers, including for example Maimonedes. Perhaps Eastern religions have taken the Via Negativa to its farthest extent, basing entire systems on the premise that nothing positive and definite can be said about the nature of reality.

One of the tensions that exists in negative theology is that a total reliance on negative statements can become sterile and uninteresting.

Negative theology today plays a far greater role in Eastern than in Western Christianity.

In the West, cataphatic theology (positive statement about God) and analogia entis (analogy of being) play a much greater role in religious writings. Cataphatic theology, of course, is all about saying what God is: God is good, perfect, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. Analogical theology attempts to describe what God is by reference to things we are better able to comprehend.

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Question:
Does atheism have any moral or intellectual significance for society today, or is it simply irrelevant?

Response:
The mere fact that a person doesn’t happen to believe in any gods isn’t very meaningful. Thus, if atheism is going to have intellectual or moral significance, it must be for other reasons. Those reasons can’t be found simply in critiques of religion or arguments against theism; instead they must be found in a general program of reason, skepticism, and critical inquiry. George Smith has labeled such a program a “habit of reasonableness.” Unreflective and unthinking atheism is no more rational than unthinking theism — and it is without question that atheists are capable of being as unreasonable and irrational as the most bizarre theist. Because of this, being a skeptical atheist requires more work and effort than simply being an atheist — it requires consciously and consistently striving to reject intellectual laziness and exercising our reasoning abilities.

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Cataphatic (sometimes spelled kataphatic) theology is the expressing of God or the divine through positive terminology. This is in contrast to defining God or the divine in what God is not, which is referred to as negative or apophatic theology. The word cataphatic itself is formed from two Greek words, "cata" meaning to descend and "femi" meaning to speak. Thus, to combine them translates the word roughly as "to bring God down in such a way so as to speak of him."

To speak of God or the divine kataphatically is thought by some to be by its nature a form of limiting to God or divine. This was one of the core tenets of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. By defining what God or the divine is we limit the unlimited. A kataphatic way to express God would be that God is love. The apophatic way would be to state that God is not hate (although such description can be accused of the same dualism). Or to say that God is not love, as he transcends even our notion of love. Ultimately, one would come to remove even the notion of the Trinity, or of saying that God is one, because The Divine is above numberhood. That God is beyond all duality because God contains within Godself all things and that God is beyond all things. The apophatic way as taught by Saint Dionysus was to remove any conceptual understanding of God that could become all-encompassing, since in its limitedness that concept would begin to force the fallen understanding of mankind onto the absolute and divine.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church kataphatic theology is critical in the developmental stages of contemplation (see theoria). Once a firm grasp of the positive attributes of God or the divine has been achieved one moves onto the transcendent qualities of the superior apophatic theology.

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