SEEING THE DIVINE

This two-part scholarly work investigates one of the most persistent questions in Western intellectual and artistic history: how human beings have conceived, questioned, represented, and transformed the idea of the divine.
Part One, The Hidden Face, offers a reasoned historical-philosophical synthesis extending from Greek myth and the pre-Socratic search for an ultimate principle to classical metaphysics, Christian patristic and scholastic theology, Renaissance and rationalist thought, the Enlightenment and Kantian critique, German Idealism and Romanticism, nineteenth-century critiques of religion, twentieth-century phenomenology and existentialism, analytic philosophy of religion, postmodern and "weak thought," the New Atheism, and contemporary debates on secularization and technological modernity. Rather than treating these traditions as a single doctrinal progression, the work follows changing configurations of the divine across metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, existential, linguistic, and cultural registers.
Part Two, The Face on the Screen, explores how cinema transforms these philosophical questions into visual form. Through major filmmakers and representative works-from silent cinema and Italian Neorealism to Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Pasolini, Buñuel, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Wenders, Kieślowski, Malick, Scorsese, Kubrick, Schrader, Aronofsky, and a broader contemporary canon-the study examines silence, grace, suffering, miracle, transcendence, sacrilege, memory, violence, embodiment, and the crisis or persistence of the sacred. The analysis also extends beyond the Judeo-Christian framework through selected Buddhist, animist, Islamic, and Eastern European perspectives.
The two parts are designed to be read together. Philosophy supplies the conceptual vocabulary; cinema becomes an autonomous laboratory in which metaphysical and theological questions are embodied in faces, bodies, light, duration, editing, landscape, sound, and silence. The result is an interdisciplinary map of the Western-and, at selected points, wider-reflection on God, faith, transcendence, secularization, and the changing forms of the sacred.