John Keats, Death Mask

What an odd thing to say; what a terrible thing to say. Surely someone is saying to himself, “Gee whiz, hasn’t she ever heard of negative capability?” As a matter of fact, I have; those words have become like a sickness unto death for me. As often as I have used them myself, I wish there were a moratorium on them for a decade, so overused are they, so bandied about that they have come to mean just about anything one wants them to, especially a bebop version of Be Here Now, or a diffusive religious awe in which the poet wanders, forever in a stupor. As with most famous sayings, we are given only a fragment of the paragraph from which it comes.

Keats believed in Beauty and mistrusted grand theories or final conclusions... even about Beauty.

“The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

Apophatic - ἀπόφασις - theology insists we cannot know God.  The infinite nature of God is beyond our understanding, far beyond our knowing.

But we can, with significant effort, find and describe what God is not.  We have a negative capability, so to speak, when it comes to engaging ultimate reality.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.