Apophatic theology or negative theology concerns the possibility and non-possibility of achieving knowledge of the divine. Apophatic theology claims an absolute difference between the human being and the divine. This difference makes the human being incapable to employ either her natural faculties or her senses in her effort to achieving knowledge of the divine. In virtue of realizing this non-possibility, she has to enter into a dimension of non-conceptuality through which she understands the discrepancy between herself and the divine. She enters “the cloud of unknowing.” Hereby she gains the wisdom that the divine is beyond comprehension and is to be perceived by renouncing her natural faculties. The divine is commonly described as “hidden” and “secret,” and the human being perceives the divine through a mental darkness. Apophatic theology employs the idea of a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between the human being and the divine.
Cataphatic theology or positive...
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Stenqvist, C. (2013). Apophatic and Cataphatic. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_200141
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