Apophatic Theology: Where the Negation Belongs

Apophatic theology, also called negative theology or the via negativa, speaks about God by denial: it says what God is not, on the ground that every positive term we possess was learned from creatures and drags creaturely limitation into whatever it names. Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides and Gregory Palamas each pressed that ground hard, and each was right about the limit they found there. The step after the limit is where the tradition went wrong. That no creature comprehends the divine essence does not entail that no positive predicate is true of God, and the reason it does not is that the negation belongs somewhere other than where it has been placed.

Key takeaways

• Negative theology is a thesis, not a temperament. It argues that creature-derived predicates import composition, that divine simplicity forbids composition, and that denial is therefore the only safe speech about God.
• Three positions travel under one label. Pseudo-Dionysius negates and then negates the negations; Maimonides admits only negative attributes and ends in silence; Palamas keeps the essence unknowable while the energies are truly known.
• The dispute is over an inference. Every party here grants that no creature comprehends God. Whether that forbids positive predication is the contested step.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps the limit and relocates the negation. The plurality of attributes sits on the receiving side, rather than inside God, where Palamas and Scotus each placed their distinctions.

What is apophatic theology?

Apophatic theology is the approach to God that proceeds by negation, holding that the divine essence is not comprehended by any creature and that our affirmations therefore misrepresent it. The word comes from the Greek apophasis, denial. Its companion term is cataphatic theology, which proceeds by affirmation, naming God good, wise, living and powerful; the Latin tag for the apophatic route is the via negativa.

Two claims travel under that one label, and almost every summary runs them together. The first is that no finite intellect comprehends God as He is in Himself. The second is that positive predication of the essence is therefore illegitimate, and that denials alone are safe. The first is nearly universal in Christian theology; Aquinas holds it, and no party to this argument denies it. The second is contested, and everything here turns on the passage from the first to the second.

One point is worth fixing at the outset, because missing it produces a standard misreading of the tradition. In apophatic usage a negation is not a privation. When Pseudo-Dionysius denies that God is living, he is not proposing that God is inert. As the Stanford Encyclopedia's account of Dionysius puts it, the godhead "is beyond the lifeless as well as beyond the living." The denial pushes the mind past the pair rather than placing God on the losing side of it.

The vocabulary this whole dispute runs on is set out from the ground up in Volume One, free to download.

What is the argument for negative theology?

The case is stronger than its summaries suggest, and it runs in three steps.

First, every predicate we possess was learned from creatures. Wise, good, powerful, living, faithful: each was acquired in a world of composite, changeable, dependent things, and acquired by watching such things. Whatever our concepts are, they were not handed to us from outside the created order.

Second, a predicate carries its home conditions with it. Creaturely wisdom is a quality a bearer has, might have lacked, and shares with other bearers. To call a man wise is to distinguish the man from his wisdom in the act of joining them. Predicate the same term of God and you have imported a bearer, a quality, and the distinction between them.

Third, that import is what divine simplicity forbids. If God has no parts of any kind, He is not a subject holding attributes, and the grammar of attribution is false of Him before any attribute is chosen. On a strict reading, if God is identical with each of His attributes, then His omniscience is identical with His omnipotence, and the language of distinct perfections becomes a report on us rather than on Him.

Put the three together and the conclusion follows. Affirmations falsify, because they carry composition; denials do not, because they remove rather than attribute. Scripture appears to say so outright, in the passage the tradition has cited for fifteen centuries:

"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8–9, NIV)

Read in place, the oracle follows directly on a promise of free pardon: the unlikeness is announced in order to make a positive promise credible. That is already awkward for the use the tradition makes of it, and it points at the larger difficulty. A God about whom nothing may be affirmed is a God about whom revelation has considerably less to say than Scripture evidently thinks it does. The prophets and the apostles are not reticent; they are voluble in the affirmative. Strict apophaticism buys its safety by treating that voice as something to be managed.

Volume Four takes the pressure this argument applies and works it through at length.

What did Pseudo-Dionysius teach in The Mystical Theology?

Pseudo-Dionysius, the late fifth- or early sixth-century author who wrote under the name of Paul's Athenian convert, is the most influential source of Christian apophatic theology. His shortest treatise, The Mystical Theology, is also his most consequential.

The ascent moves through purgation and illumination to union, with Moses on Sinai as the allegory. At the summit the mind does not acquire a better concept. It loses the ones it had. The initiate is plunged "unto the Darkness of Unknowing wherein he renounces all the apprehensions of his understanding."

The negations are correspondingly total. God, in the closing chapter, "is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding," and the list runs on until it swallows the words a theologian would think safest: "nor is It one, nor is It unity, nor is It Godhead or Goodness."

Most summaries stop there, and stopping there gets him exactly backwards. He does not end on the denials. He denies the denials:

"nor can any affirmation or negation apply to it; for while applying affirmations or negations to those orders of being that come next to It, we apply not unto It either affirmation or negation, inasmuch as It transcends all affirmation by being the perfect and unique Cause of all things, and transcends all negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute nature."

That second negation keeps the method from collapsing into the claim that God is a void, and it is why the sharpest objection to negative theology lands more softly on him than on anyone else. Ranking his denials, Dionysius writes: "Surely it is truer to affirm that God is life and goodness than that He is air or stone." He grades affirmations. He does not flatten them.

And there his system stops short. If every affirmation falsifies equally, none can be truer than another, and yet he plainly sees that some are. He saw the ordering and gave no account of what makes it hold.

Volume One builds the rule his ordering of affirmations needed; it is free.

Why did Maimonides allow only negative attributes?

Moses Maimonides, writing for Jewish readers in the twelfth century, produced the most rigorous version of the position, and the Christian tradition met the argument chiefly through Aquinas's reply to it. Chapter fifty-eight of the first part of The Guide for the Perplexed opens without softening: "Know that the negative attributes of God are the true attributes: they do not include any incorrect notions or any deficiency whatever in reference to God, while positive attributes imply polytheism, and are inadequate."

His reasoning is compressed and exact. God's existence includes no composition, and we comprehend the fact that He exists rather than His essence. "Consequently it is a false assumption to hold that He has any positive attribute." A positive attribute would need something superadded to the essence, and there is nothing in God to superadd it to.

What survives is a disciplined vocabulary of denials, and he works the examples himself. "We say that it is living, expressing thereby that it is not dead." Not ignorant means that it perceives. Each denial narrows the field without composing the object, which is the whole advantage claimed for the method.

It ends, in chapter fifty-nine, with praise itself under suspicion. The idea, he writes, "is best expressed in the book of Psalms, 'Silence is praise to Thee.'" He then recounts the rabbi who rebuked a man for piling up divine epithets in prayer, with a parable about a king who owned millions of gold coins and was praised for owning silver. The praise was the insult.

This is negative theology arriving honestly at its destination, and the destination is the cost. A theology in which the safest liturgical act is silence has made the worshipper's ordinary speech into a hazard to be handled.

The reply the Christian tradition gave him runs through the whole series; start with Volume One.

What is the essence and energies distinction?

Gregory Palamas, defending the hesychast monks of Mount Athos in the fourteenth century, took the apophatic limit seriously and refused its usual consequence. God's essence, he held, remains unknowable and unparticipable; God's energies, His operations and self-giving presence, are God Himself as He reaches the creature, and union with them is a real deification rather than a metaphor. The distinction is not a device of our thinking. As the article on Palamite theology states it, the central idea "is a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies that is not a merely conceptual distinction."

The controversy that produced it was bitter. Barlaam of Calabria mocked the monks' practice and denied that the light seen by the disciples at the Transfiguration was uncreated. "I must confess that I do not know what this light is," he wrote. "I only know that it does not exist." He held the hesychast claim to amount to polytheism. Six patriarchal councils between 1341 and 1351 examined the dispute, and the council of May 1351 "conclusively exonerated Palamas and condemned his opponents."

The achievement deserves stating by its own lights. This is the only classical form of negative theology that secures genuine knowledge of God without claiming comprehension of the essence, and without reducing that knowledge to inference from effects. The believer meets God, not a report about God.

The cost is equally plain, and Western critics named it at once: a distinction in God that is more than conceptual looks like a distinction in a being who is supposed to have none. Whether that compromises divine simplicity has been argued ever since. Jean-Luc Marion, who carries the Dionysian line into contemporary philosophy, presses further, arguing that theology should pass beyond both affirmation and denial to a naming that refuses to place God under the category of being.

Where does apophatic theology run into trouble?

Three pressures fall on the position, and only the third is decisive.

The first is self-reference. "God is unknowable" is itself a claim about God, and if affirmation falsifies then this affirmation falsifies too. Dionysius absorbs the objection by negating his negations, and Maimonides would answer that the claim reports our apprehension rather than the divine essence. It is a toll rather than a wall.

The second is the difficulty of telling the result apart from agnosticism. If what remains at the summit is unknowing, what separates it from simply not knowing? That the unknowing was reached by a route is a real answer, though it satisfies fewer readers than its defenders think.

The third is Aquinas, and it has never been adequately met. In the Summa Theologiae he states the apophatic reading of the divine names accurately and attributes it: such names have been used "more to express some remotion from God, rather than to express anything that exists positively in Him," and "this was taught by Rabbi Moses." His third reason bites hardest: "because this is against the intention of those who speak of God. For in saying that God lives, they assuredly mean more than to say [that] He is the cause of our life, or that He differs from inanimate bodies."

That is an observation about what worshippers are doing with their words, and revelation confirms it, because God supplies the affirmations Himself:

"And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, 'The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…'" (Exodus 34:6–7, NIV)

Aquinas reads such language exactly: "So when we say, 'God is good,' the meaning is not, 'God is the cause of goodness,' or 'God is not evil'; but the meaning is, 'Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God,' and in a more excellent and higher way."

Every dilemma in the series is met the same way; the first volume is free.

What do Thomist analogy and Scotist univocity offer instead?

Two standard middles stand between strict apophaticism and the flat claim that our words mean of God what they mean of us.

Thomist analogy holds that terms are said of God and creatures neither univocally nor equivocally but according to proportion, so that "wise" said of God is related to "wise" said of a man without being identical to it. What the doctrine has never supplied is a test that can be failed: a rule stating which words may cross and what changes in the crossing. That gap is argued out in the Thomism article.

Scotist univocity takes the opposite route. Duns Scotus held that the concept of being is one concept when said of God and of creatures, differing in mode rather than in sense, on the ground that if our concepts merely resembled the ones that apply to God we would have no concept of God at all. What that owes in return is an account of why the Creator is not thereby one more item in a shared inventory of beings.

Both agree against Maimonides on the point that matters: some affirmation reaches God truly. What neither has settled, and what strict apophaticism never asked, is the prior question. All three argue about whether a word crosses. None asks where the difference between God as He is and God as named is located.

The rule for the crossing is argued from two axioms in Volume One.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer apophatic theology?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the position of the Many Beings Framework, and against strict apophaticism, Thomist analogy and Scotist univocity alike it answers this dispute by locating the negation rather than by adjusting the strength of our affirmations.

Its conclusions are few, and unlike Maimonides' negative attributes or Palamas's essence and energies they can be stated without their derivation. Beings whose natures differ in kind apprehend reality in frames that differ in kind, and the Creator differs from the creature more deeply than any two creatures differ from each other. Certain predicates carry their frame with them, so that using one across the divide without an index is a formal equivocation. That equivocation is the Many Beings Fallacy, and the classical dilemmas commit it.

Begin with the grant, which goes further than either Aquinas or Scotus went. The apophatic limit is not merely tolerated here; it is entailed. A finite intellect apprehending the undivided essence directly would find nothing within it set over against anything else, no aspect to take hold of, and would be left able to affirm nothing determinate. Maimonides and Pseudo-Dionysius were reporting something real, and this position can say why.

What does not follow is the prohibition. The inference from "no creature comprehends the essence" to "affirmation falsifies" needs a premise nobody states: that a predicate must either mean what it means of creatures or mean nothing. Both slots come from the creature's own frame, built to parse composite and participating things, and requiring God to occupy one of them is the fallacy in its local form. Thomist analogy resists that demand with a doctrine and Scotist univocity resists it with a single concept; neither names it. Knowing truly and comprehending exhaustively are two achievements, and demanding the second as the price of the first turns a real limit into a false prohibition.

Now the relocation. One undivided act, meeting a bounded intellect, arrives as a spectrum of distinct perfections, the way one light meeting a prism arrives as colours. The plurality is in the reception. Palamas placed the distinction between the unknowable and the known inside God, as essence and energies; Scotus placed his formal distinction in the divine essence, seeing that something is genuinely distinct and refusing to call it nothing. Both instincts were right and both landed on the wrong side. What is distinct is our concepts of the perfections, and what founds that distinction in reality is the refraction itself.

The attributes are not thereby our projection. The refraction runs from God to the creature and never the reverse, and the creature's mode of knowing is itself sustained by the God it knows. A prism does not manufacture light.

Nor is the boundary a shortfall that a stronger mind or a longer sanctification would remove. It is fixed by the natures, which is why the glorified who see face to face will still know God under a manifold. The beatific vision enlarges the refraction rather than ending it. And the fact that no addition of attributes ever reconstitutes the simple essence is evidence of the simplicity it refracts rather than a failure of theology to finish its work.

The statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism sets out in one place the position argued here against strict apophaticism and Thomist analogy.

How the positions compare

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between apophatic and cataphatic theology?

Cataphatic theology affirms: it names God good, wise, living, just. Apophatic theology denies: it says God is not finite, not composite, not material. They are less rival departments than rival accounts of which kind of statement is the more accurate, and a theologian may use both and still owe an answer about which carries the truth.

Is apophatic theology biblical?

Both halves of the evidence are in Scripture, which is the point. Moses is told that "no one may see me and live" (Exodus 33:20, NIV), and Paul says God "lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16, NIV). Yet God proclaims His own name in positive perfections at Exodus 34:6–7, and Jeremiah 9:24 makes knowing them the only permissible boast.

Is apophatic theology just agnosticism?

Not in intent. The agnostic has no route and no object; the apophatic theologian reaches unknowing by an ascent and holds that the unknowing is of someone. The charge sticks where the second negation is dropped and denial becomes the whole method.

Volume One shows the step the charge assumes is missing.

Was Aquinas an apophatic theologian?

Partly, and more than his critics allow. He holds that we do not know the divine essence in this life and that our names fall short of what God is. What he refuses is the claim that affirmations signify only negation or relation to creatures, which he attributes to Maimonides. His alternative is analogical predication.

What is the essence and energies distinction?

It is Gregory Palamas's doctrine that God's essence is unknowable and unparticipable while God's energies, His operations and self-communication, are truly God and truly shared with creatures. It preserves real knowledge of God alongside the apophatic limit. Western critics have argued since the fourteenth century that such a distinction in God compromises divine simplicity.

Where to go from here

For fifteen centuries the argument has been about which words cross. Strict apophaticism said none of the ones that matter; Thomist analogy said they cross in a related sense; Scotist univocity said the core concepts cross intact. The prior question went unasked: where the difference between God as He is and God as named is located. Put it on the receiving side and the apophatic limit stands, the affirmations stand with it, and neither is traded for the other.

Exodus says it in narrative before anyone said it in argument. Moses asks to see the glory and in one speech is refused the face and promised the name; the next morning the name is proclaimed over him in a list of perfections. Same mountain, same answer, both true.

Volume One sets out the two axioms and names the fallacy, and it is free to download. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, is where the refraction of the attributes is worked through in full.

Related reading

• Kenoticism and Kenosis
• Haecceity
• Aseity: God’s Self-Existence and the Platonist Challenge