apophatic

1. (theology) Pertaining to knowledge of God obtained through negation rather than positive assertions.Examples: "For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence."; "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."

2. (by extension) That passively defines a thing by describing what is not characteristic of it.Examples: "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—[…]"broadly