NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

Abstract

The 20th century is coming to a close leaving us with a sense of exhaustion in the matter of rational investigations, even in the area of religious philosophy. After a protracted period of intense intellectual activity that marked the 19th century and the greater part of the 20th, very creative both in scientific investigations and philosophical analyses, man is still in doubt whether he can positively comprehend what he has been looking for so long. As in earlier periods of intellectual crisis also today, negative philosophy has come to the aid of man to enable him to take his bearings. Existentialism that concentrated on the concrete existence of man finding himself thrown into the world in the midst of other things, focuses attention on Nothingxess, the Nothing from which man came and the Nothing into which he seems to be going. Linguistic philosophy finds man's struggle with words, concepts and language itself very much a sort of a game closed in itself with its own rules and methods of procedure, trying to come to grips with reality but always kept away from it by the intrinsic limitations of the game itself.