The author makes his position clear. ‘Our existence as embodied beings means that place is as necessary to us as the air we breathe but, more than that, it seems to me that our human experience is shaped by place’(p. ix). Yet from Aristotle onwards, place has not been an important category for Western thought. More contemporary philosophical reflection is devoted to space, in its abstract generality, than to place in its contemporary particularity. It is a pity that consideration of place has not had the benefit of the abundant modern thought on corporeity: it shows little interest in this link between the body and its place in space.
Moreover, modern society is undergoing change in its relationship to place: contemporary humanity is structured by mobility, communication technology, globalisation and relocation, not to mention migrants and refugees. These elements do not cut us off from the places we belong to, but make us inhabit them differently. There too, according to Inge, philosophy is largely absent. In Christian thought, we see the same lack of interest: theological tradition, both historically and today, seems to repeat this deficiency. This weakness is all the more harmful when we observe that in the Bible, by contrast, there is keen interest in places and a rich crop of references.
Inge, indeed, urges us to read the Old Testament as the narrative of a three‐way interaction between God, a people and a place. It is the story of a land, promised, hoped‐for, inhabited, lost and found (and which was to be lost again, outside Scripture, for twenty centuries). Traces remain of this story in Christian life. For instance, the Exile: this was God's means of destroying perverse forms of attachment of the people to their place, by deporting them elsewhere; this metaphor of relocation endures in Christian spirituality, as the Salve Regina bears witness. Inge says that ‘for Jews it is as if Yahweh himself has an address on earth’(p. 45). The same does not seem to be true of Christians. Their relationship to God is no longer channeled through a land. It even seems unduly spiritualised in Jewish eyes. Indeed St Paul in his epistles gives no space to places (Acts is quite different in this respect). For St John, God's place on earth becomes a person, the Word made flesh, in whom the meeting with man occurs. But in spite of this ‘Christification’ every meeting, having a sacramental quality, is a human reality and thus situated in space. Eschatology too gives value to places: Jesus tells us that he is ‘going to prepare a place for us’(Jn 14:2), while the Apocalypse sings of the heavenly Jerusalem, the place where all the elect will come together.
Theologians may have paid little attention to these aspects of revelation, but the practices of the faithful were certainly different. Early on, certain places were felt to be significant, and Catholicism especially developed attention to sacred places by means of shrines and pilgrimages. The Reformation, on the other hand, distanced itself from them, in its attempt to destroy particular features not only of race but also of place. Even so, Inge makes a plea for the rediscovery of the importance of our stone churches, as anchor‐points for the faith of the laity and signs, if they are alive, for a society that longs for points of reference.
Thus, this book contains many original insights. It is not convincing when it claims that no attention has been paid to places in Western thought. There is plenty of philosophical reflection on the subject, for example Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space deserves more than a passing mention. The contribution of human sciences is also not given its due. Another example: the discussion of space in Peter Brown's book The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity(which is cited) has superb analyses of the development of Christianity in the West as if in ‘pools’ around the tombs of saints. Maurice Halbwachs's important book, La Topographie Légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte would have provided useful distinctions between real places and imaginary places.
Yet one hesitates to mention other works, for Inge's book comes across to a large extent as a multiplication of references to authors, almost always ‘relocated’ out of all context, from whom he borrows an idea or quotation before passing on to another. This makes reading him difficult. Perhaps the subject is, all things considered, less neglected than Inge says, but what we need is a more synthetic reflection. This book has the merit of preparing the way for such an undertaking in the future.
