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:

  1. How was the world generated? (emanation and ex nihilo)
  2. Are we of the same nature as the divine? (continuity and discontinuity)
  3. What can we know and say about the divine? (kataphatic and apophatic)
  4. How do we commune with the divine?
Painting by Eraclis Aristidou