Adjective: apophatic
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more apophatic |
| Superlative | most apophatic |
Sample Sentences
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For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence. [2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 488:]
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Augustine had absorbed the underlying spirit of Greek apophatic theology, but the West did not develop a fully fledged spirituality of silence until the ninth century, when the writings of an unknown Greek author were translated into Latin and achieved near-canonical status in Europe. [2009, Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Vintage, published 2010, page 123:]
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Here is a sudden interruption of remorseless, detailed exposition with a triple-punch of one-sentence paragraphs of self-indentification (2.1–2.4), and of an apophatic, negative kind, statements of what communists are not, have not, do not—[…] [2022, China Miéville, chapter 6, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:]
Adjectives inflected like apophatic
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Ancient Greek ἀποφατικός (apophatikós, “negative”).