Via Negativa — The Way of Negation
Pseudo-Dionysius's apophatic method: God is known not by what God is but by what God is not. Every affirmation about the divine must be negated, and then the negation must be negated. God is not good — not because God is evil but because God exceeds goodness. The method strips away conceptual idols until the mind stands naked before what it cannot think. Hex 41 (Decrease) is the lake at the foot of the mountain — the lower is decreased to increase the upper. The hexagram insists that decrease undertaken sincerely, with 'two small bowls,' is itself the supreme offering. Dionysius would recognize this economy: the less you claim to know, the more you actually approach. Both systems treat subtraction as a positive operation. The resonance is methodological, not doctrinal.