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| Caird at a meeting of the Oxford Theology Faculty, 1972. Over the years he helped to guide the university through many changes in the curriculum, including the creation of the Certificate in Theology. This allowed an alternative to the Honour School of Theology for those who wished to pursue the Oxford educational experience (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| The fifth of Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God's existence was based on teleology (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Johannes Scotus Eriugena was among the first to propose that God became the Universe, and did so to learn something about itself. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Apophatic theology
(from Ancient Greek: ἀπόφασις, from ἀπόφημι – apophēmi, "to deny")—also known as negative theology, via negativa or via negationis[1] (Latin for "negative way" or "by way of denial")—is a theology 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.[2] It
stands in contrast with cataphatic
theology.
A startling example
can be found with theologian
John Scotus
Erigena (9th century): "
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 Good 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 the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer
man.
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