 The apophatic way as taught by Saint Dionysus was to remove any conceptual understanding of God that could become all-encompassing, since in its limitedness that concept would begin to force the fallen understanding of mankind onto the absolute and divine.In the Eastern Orthodox Church kataphatic theology is critical in the developmental stages of contemplation (see theoria).Once a firm grasp of the positive attributes of God or the divine has been achieved one moves onto the transcendent qualities of the superior or at least the corrective apophatic theology.