50 Key Concepts in Theology

Negative Theology
A theology that speaks of God by saying what he is not.
Negative theology, or the via negativa (negative way), tries to describe
God either in negative statements or by avoiding speaking directly about God.
Negative theology is particularly important in Eastern Orthodox Christianity
and in the Christian mystical tradition.
The presumption of negative theology is that human thoughts and
languages are by their nature incapable of describing divine reality. To speak
positively of God, by saying God is X or Y, would be both presumptuous and
untruthful. The only way to avoid this mistake is to find a way of talking
about God by not talking about him.
We could think of negative theology through the analogy of sculpture.
The sculptor cuts away at a block of stone, removing unwanted material until
the design is revealed. As the sculptor shapes the figure by subtraction, so
negative theology reveals God by showing what he is not.
The biblical roots of negative theology lie in the sermons against idolatry
that we find in the Old Testament prophets, such as Deutero-Isaiah, who
insists that the ‘living God’ is too vast for any human portrayal: ‘To whom
can you compare God? What image can you contrive of him?’ (Isa. 40:18).
The philosophical origins of negative theology lie in Platonism and neo-
Platonism. Plato had declared that the highest reality (the Good) was ‘beyond
being’. The neo-Platonist thinker Plotinus, for example, describes God (or
‘the One’) as formless, unmeasurable and infinite. Although we can make a
contemplative journey towards God, we must in the end relinquish all
attempts at understanding in order to reach out to God in his pure one-ness.
This final abandonment to God is what Plotinus called ‘the flight of the alone
to the alone’.
A weak form of negative theology – that is to say, the belief that God
transcends human thoughts and words – has always been implicit in Christian
thinking, and most theologians would argue for the value of negative theology
alongside positive theology. Some mystical theologians, however, have
believed that positive theology is impossible, and that the negative path is the
only road that theologians should take. This reaches an extreme form in
Meister Eckhart’s refusal to say even that God exists and Angelus Silesius’
talk about the ‘nothingness’ of God. Recently, there has been a revival of
interest in the via negativa among some post-modern theologians (for
example, Mark C. Taylor, Kevin Hart and John Caputo).

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The principal objection to a wholly negative theology is that we cannot
make negative judgements about God without first having some positive
knowledge of him. The statement, ‘God is not evil’ presumes some positive
understanding that God is good. The sculptor can only chip off unwanted
stone because he knows the shape that he wants to emerge underneath.
Negative theology has also had an impact on modern secular philosophy.
Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973) is an example. Adorno thought
that positive truth claims lead to totalitarianism and fascism, and advocated ‘a
negation of negation that will not become a positing … It lies in the definition
of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself as if it were total.
This is its form of hope’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 406).
The legacy of negative theology can also be seen in some post-modern
artists. The sparse canvases of Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross have
no figures of Christ, just abstract lines leaving the viewer to deduce God (or
not) from their theological emptiness. Mark Rothko’s brooding panes of dark
colour are another example of a secular negative theology. Rothko evokes a
sense of the mystical without ever describing it, which is why his paintings
can work in a multi-religious ‘spiritual environment’ like The Rothko Chapel
(Houston, Texas). Similarly, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot can be read
in the light of negative theology as an attempt to speak about the divine
through its absence.
THINKERS
St Thomas Aquinas argued that negative theology was a necessary
preliminary to any positive theology.
Denis (or Dionysius) the Areopagite – also called Pseudo-Dionysius (c.
500) – argued in his Mystical Theology that, although we can contemplate
God in a symbolic way through metaphors and names, God himself is wholly
beyond our ability to comprehend.
Petru Dumitriu (1924–2002): a Romanian writer who argued, in To The
Unknown God (1979), that God is most real in silence and absence.
Johannes (‘Meister’) Eckhart (c. 1260–1327/8) argued that negative
theology must go so far as declaring God to be non-existent. This was not an
atheistic statement, rather a refusal to define God by human concepts of
‘existence’. Near the end of his life he was tried as a heretic by Pope John
XXII.
St John of the Cross (1542–91) wrote mystical theology and poetry,
believing that the closer we get to God, the less we comprehend: ‘In my soul I

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felt, revealing,/ A sense that, though its sense was naught,/ Transcended
knowledge with my thought’ (from ‘Verses written after an ecstasy of high
exaltation’).
St Paul (3–65) tells in Acts 17 of seeing an altar dedicated to ‘the
unknown God’ – an example of negative theological description. Paul argued
that ‘the unknown God’ is in fact ‘known’ in the form of the Christian God,
‘in whom we live and move and have our being’.
Angelus Silesius/Johannes Scheffer (1624–77) argued for an extreme
negative theology in The Cherubic Wanderer, saying that ‘God is sheer
nothingness … To become nothing is to become God.’
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 394) argued that God’s infinity necessarily
makes him unknowable.
Plato (427–347 bc) described ‘the Good’ (or the highest reality) as
‘beyond being’ – epekeina tes ousias (The Republic, 508b) – and therefore
beyond the reach of thought and language.
Plotinus (205–70) believed that we must abandon ourselves to God in
contemplation rather than trying to understand him.
Proclus (412–85) argued in The Elements of Theology that ‘the gods are
superessential, and subsist prior to beings; they cannot be apprehended by
opinion, science or discursive reason, or by intelligence’ (Proposition 123).
The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century spiritual
book, says that ‘of God Himself no man can think’. ‘Your intense need to
understand will … undermine your quest [to find God]. It will replace the
darkness which you have pierced … with clear images of something which,
however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God.’
IDEAS
Apophatic theology: another term for negative theology, and the opposite
of kataphatic (or positive) theology.
Aufhebung: a concept in Hegel’s philosophy which means ‘negating in
order to move forward’.
The Dark Night of the Soul: a spiritual discipline, described by St John of
the Cross, that uses the absence of knowledge and the senses as a ‘secret
ladder’ to reach God.
‘Negative capability’: a term used by John Keats to describe the state
‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without

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any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’
Otherness of God: the idea that God is essentially strange to us.
BOOKS
Denys Turner and Oliver Davies (eds.), Silence and the Word: Negative
Theology and Incarnation (CUP, 2002)

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