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Deus Loci: The Place of God and the God of Place in Philosophy and Theology

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Notes

  1. Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems: 1931-1974, ed. James A. Brigham (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 214.

  2. W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, with Introduction and Commentary by Christopher Taylor (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 18.

  3. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity trans. John Howe, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008).

  4. Augé, Non-Places, p.83.

  5. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.ix. Casey’s earlier book-length treatment of place is Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). For a good summary of Casey’s views on place and space, though with a slight anthropological focus, see his paper, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), pp. 13-52.

  6. Casey, The Fate of Place, p. x.

  7. Keith H. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape,” in Feld and Basso (eds), Senses of Place, pp. 53-90.

  8. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” p. 67.

  9. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” p. 70.

  10. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” p. 74.

  11. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 43. Cf. the disparaging comment of geographer David Sopher: “To be rooted is the property of vegetables” (quoted in Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 97).

  12. Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  13. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 23.

  14. For more details on the varied meanings of ‘place,’ see The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 11, pp. 937-42.

  15. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 123.

  16. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 30.

  17. Malpas, Place and Experience, pp. 31-32, emphasis his.

  18. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 219, emphasis in the original. See also Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” where he writes: “To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell” (in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: HarperCollins, 2008, p. 349).

  19. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 82.

  20. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 94.

  21. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 100.

  22. A similar criticism is made by Peter Loptson in his review of Malpas’ Place and Experience, in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 56, 2002, p. 188.

  23. Thomas F. Tracy, “Divine Action,” in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 301-2.

  24. Tracy, however, offers a different line of response. He writes: “Our mental activities may be dependent upon brain events, but the description of such an activity (say, counting backward from 100) does not, by itself, entail any statements about brain events” (“Divine Action,” pp. 301-2).

  25. Sarah Furness, ‘A Reasonable Geography: An Argument for Embodiment,’ PhD dissertation, University of Essex, 1986, pp.255-56. Quoted in Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 133.

  26. See Mark Wynn, “Knowledge of Place and Knowledge of God: Contemporary Philosophies of Place and Some Questions in Philosophical Theology,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007): 149-69.

  27. Wynn, “Knowledge of Place and Knowledge of God,” pp. 163-65.

  28. Seamus Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 (New York: The Noonday Press, 1980), p. 145.

  29. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 176, emphasis in the original.

  30. It might be worth noting, as some critics of Malpas’ book have, that ‘Proust’s Principle’ is a far stronger (and therefore more controversial) claim than the one made in the main body of Malpas’ book, Place and Experience. In earlier chapters, Malpas argued that human identity and subjectivity are constituted by place. But with Proust’s Principle, Malpas introduces the very different idea that one’s particular self-identity (and not merely human identity in general) is constituted by particular places (and not simply place in general). See the reviews of Malpas’ book by Carleton B. Christensen (in Mind 110 (2001): 791) and David Macarthur (in Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 634).

  31. Aristotle, Physics 208b, 34-35; trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 355.

  32. See Casey, The Fate of Place, Chaps. 3 and 4.

  33. Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. 14. Casey has dubbed this ‘the Archytian Axiom.’

  34. But like philosophers, theologians have also been strangely reticent about place, a situation that has begun to be corrected by, among others, Geoffrey R. Lilburne, A Sense of Place: A Christian Theology of the Land (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989) and John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

  35. David Tacey, Re-enchanment: The New Australian Spirituality (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 94. Belden Lane similarly notes (in Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality, expended edition, Blatimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 224-28) that Western spirituality, in its Platonic anti-materialist vein and its turn to inwardness, has tended to devalue the embodied and material contexts of faith, where this includes the places of faith.

  36. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 192.

  37. Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 192. Malpas refers to Karsten Harries’ The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 254-67) and notes that Harries there “emphasises the connection between a proper sense of place (through dwelling) and a sense of mortality” (p. 192, n31). But though Harries is clearly unsympathetic to the notion of an afterlife or personal immortality, this is not essential to his argument that building and architecture ought to reflect rather than evade our mortality – and this is borne out by the fact that Harries himself illustrates his argument by appealing to the structure and design of specific churches.

  38. Malpas, Place and Experience, pp. 191-92.

  39. Malpas, “Death and the Unity of Life,” in Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds), Death and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 134.

  40. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Labyrinths ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 135-49.

  41. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 144.

  42. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 140.

  43. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 141.

  44. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 144.

  45. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 145.

  46. Borges, “The Immortal,” pp. 144-45.

  47. Borges, “The Immortal,” p. 145.

  48. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Creation of Man 5; PG 44:137c.

  49. See Centuries on Love III: 25; in St. Maximus the Confessor, The Ascetic Life, The Four Centuries on Charity, trans. Polycarp Sherwood (New York: The Newman Press, 1955), p. 177.

  50. See John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), pp. 143-46; and Jean Daniélou, “Introduction”, in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, ed. and trans. Herbert Musurillo (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 11.

  51. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.

  52. For an excellent and comprehensive study of ‘theosis,’ see Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  53. Andrew Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology,” in Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (eds), Partakers of Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 32-44.

  54. Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology,” pp. 34-35.

  55. Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology,” p. 35.

  56. Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology,” p. 39.

  57. John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 116.

  58. Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World, p. 117.

  59. Quoted in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, p. 144. The passage occurs in Gregory’s Life of Moses, PG 44:400d-401b. In On the Soul and the Resurrection Gregory compares the human soul to “a container which would always become larger with the addition of what would be poured into it. For the participation in the divine good is such that it makes anyone into whom it enters greater and more receptive. As it is taken up it increases the power and magnitude of the recipient, so that the person who is nourished always grows and never ceases from growth” (trans. Catharine P. Roth, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993, p. 87).

  60. Durrell, “Deus Loci”, in Collected Poems: 1931-1974, p. 217.

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    N. N. Trakakis

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Trakakis, N.N. Deus Loci: The Place of God and the God of Place in Philosophy and Theology. SOPHIA 52, 315–333 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0314-4

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