The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.

This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.

The phrase ‘a spiritual space’ is used by Certeau at the end of his brief analysis of hagiographic material in ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’. The essay is one of three explorations in the production of certain topographies of the other found in The Writing of History. The spiritual space is another of Certeau’s non-places. Hagiography announces that a “non-place is here a discourse of places.” That is how he concludes the essay. What I wish to demonstrate in this essay is the way spiritual topoi govern Certeau’s understanding of the production of space both in its heterological and non-heterological forms. These spiritual spaces are profoundly theological in character and liturgical in economy. The direction of my argument, therefore, emphasizes, again, the importance of reading Certeau’s project theologically.

‘Spiritual spaces’ are not at the centre of Certeau’s work; they make that work possible. Other forms of space are focused upon and it is by mapping out these spaces that alternative places are opened up. I wish to examine three kinds of space explored, in fact, produced, in Certeau’s work. They correspond to three different epochs of time and three kinds of utopia [which, following the work of Louis Marin on Thomas More needs to be understood as both outopia (no-place) and Utopia (a good place)]. In outlining these three spaces, Certeau’s concerns with ethnography, speaking and texts at the dawn of modernity come more clearly into focus.

The Rational Utopia

The first space I will term, after Certeau, the ‘rational utopia’. It is the space produced by the closed system, what Certeau will describe as “a bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible production of an order.”

João Poinsot (1589-1644) was a Dominican theologian of the commentator school, born in Lisbon of an Austrian father and a Portuguese mother, and briefly confessor to Philip IV of Spain. He was known as John of St. Thomas, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, though writers today refer to him as “Poinsot.” As Royal Confessor, he used his political influence at the Court of Madrid in favour of Louvain against the papal bull In eminenti which he believed was defective and based on false information. Poinsot protected the Doctors of the Faculty of Theology who were secular clergy, some of whom held a traditional Augustinian theology. His letter to John Schinckels (1581-1646) and the other Professors of the Faculty was written May 14, 1644, as a response to their Memorial in which they stated their case. Poinsot thought that the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen was as a whole unfairly judged, even if part of it might be erroneous. He also believed the King of Spain had the right to make a better judgment pending clarification and that it was his duty to help the Pope make a deeper study of the issue. Therefore Poinsot advised the Court to withhold the place in this doctrinal matter. He died soon thereafter on June 17, 1644. This was still during the earliest phase before the pejorative name “Jansenist” had permanently stuck. A royal placet was required to promulgate papal bulls in the Spanish possessions, and it was delayed until years after Poinsot's death, partly due to his initial efforts.

Any reader of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with the slightest interest in beauty, the arts and literature must remember the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the fatuous fathead, Lynch, on aesthetics, with special reference to the definition of beauty by St Thomas Aquinas. In this short piece I shall compare Stephen's interpretation of Aquinas's definition and succinct analysis with some notes on the aesthetic from Wittgenstein's Notebooks 1914-1916.

Aquinas's definition - Pulchra sunt quae visa placent - defies elegant direct translation. Literally it means ‘Those things are beautiful which give pleasure [merely on being] seen'. Joyce’s translation (which involves interpretation) is as good as any: ‘that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases'. He expands the notion of visa from the visual to, as he (Stephen/Joyce) puts it: ‘aesthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension.’ This would include the beauty of floral smells, the taste of fruit, the taste of an imaginative cuisine, the feel of a hot bath in winter or a cool pool in summer. In Joyce’s view all these would be, on his interpretation of Aquinas, aesthetic apprehensions.

There follows a good deal about aesthetics which is Joyce's own. Then he returns to Aquinas and his threefold analysis of beauty: Ad pulcritudinem tria requirunlur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. This Joyce translates for his own purposes as: ‘Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.’ In his original and personal interpretation—none the worse for the that—Stephen draws Lynch's attention to a basket which a butcher's boy ‘had slung inverted on his head'!