The negative theology is an approach of the Théologie which consists in insisting more on what God is not not that on what God is.

Negative theology can be developed in two ways:

• by negation (apophatic step , of the Greek apophasis : negation)
• or by abstraction (aphairetic method , of the Greek, aphairesis : abstraction).

Apophatism, or aphairetic method, is a thought processe by which the idea that one is done of the divinity cannot be expressed by positive proposals. For example, the assertion: “God exists”, cannot conceive himself in negative theology. Not more than: “God is miséricordieux”. The expression of the transcendence is expressed only by negative proposals and a recourse to the abstraction.

This way of thinking draws its origin in ancient philosophy. One finds it in the Christian theological thought as in certain modern philosophical currents which were interested in the forms of the language. The concept of abstraction is present, indeed, in Antiquity, at the same time in the tradition peripatetician and that of the Académie. It is about an intuitive intellectual operation which claims to separate in the forms the essence of not-essence. This form of subtraction, the Old ones initially apply it to the mathematical to define surface by cutting off of volume, the line by cutting off of the surface and thus gradually until the paramount unit. By extending this concept to logic, the predicate attribute of the subject and the subject itself are presented in the form of a sum: the negation of the predicate is comparable with the cutting off and the intellectual operation abstracted from separation seems a negative operation.

Such a step arose fundamentally from the Idéalisme insofar as knowledge goes up, by subtraction and negation, of tangible reality to invisible reality, of immanent with the transcendent one. It presents at the same time a negative side, the operation of cutting off, and a positive side, the intuitive perception of higher realities. The abstraction arises as an ontological step which makes it possible to reach the higher forms of knowledge.