My first comprehensive exam offers a history of apophasis running from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite. This context is the occasion to examine evolving responses to four fundamental questions about the human relationship to the divine:
- How was the world generated? (emanation and ex nihilo)
- Are we of the same nature as the divine? (continuity and discontinuity)
- What can we know and say about the divine? (kataphatic and apophatic)
- How do we commune with the divine?
