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Although the subtitle of this volume speaks of a broad concern with the perception of the sacred across ‘nature, landscape, and art’, its main title is suggestive of something more specific. Numinous Fields not only invokes the spirit of the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, but it also brings a certain spatial or, better, topological inflection (arguably already there in Otto’s original work) that immediately draws the attention of a self-proclaimed philosophical topologist or ‘topographer’ like me.1

Perhaps the most basic characterisation of a ‘field’ is as an open yet bounded domain (something reflected in the reference back, in the etymology of the term, to an Indo-European root meaning ‘flat’2 )—a domain that, one might add, allows for appearance and encounter (of any and every kind including that of ordinary perception), for presence and coming to presence. I cannot be sure whether Samer Akkach and John Powell had this in mind when they chose their title. However, talk of ‘numinous fields’ does seem to direct us toward the open, bounded domain that makes for the presence or coming into presence of that which is often experienced in terms of the holy or the sacred, and that may well be understood in terms that can also be given a more traditionally ‘secular’ reading—for instance, in terms of ‘wonder’, ‘awe’, the ‘sublime’, all of which seem to be involved in Otto’s mysterium tremendum.3

That the idea of the numinous, and so perhaps of the holy or the sacred also, might indeed carry such a topological inflection is itself suggested by the way the numinous is not only a term attached to a certain type or form of experience, but to a mode of presence. As Otto himself puts it, ‘the numen must be experienced as present, a numen praesens’.4 What is at issue is the presence of, and so the encounter with, that which is experienced as other (and not only in the sense of being other than the ordinary), and so which stands in relation to us and in the ‘same’ place.

If we think of what is at issue in the word ‘presence’ as the word appears in English, then ‘presence’ means something very like ‘being close to’, or perhaps even more directly, ‘being there’/‘being here’. The same ambiguities that attach to the term presence can also be found in relation to these latter two terms, but ‘being close to’ and ‘being there’/‘being here’, understood in terms of presence, nevertheless more directly draw attention to the character of presence as tied to place—to the ‘there’, the ‘here’, to ‘nearness’.

Presence does not occur in some levelled out unbounded expanse. Presence is indeed ‘here and now’—it is the opening up of the world in this moment, this place. But the ‘there’ and the ‘now’ that appear here are not to be construed as locatable on some extended plane or in some series of countable instants. There is no presence in mere extension or seriality nor in simple duration. Presence is not to be understood as the presence just of the present instant in time any more than it is the presence of the isolated location in space. Presence is indeed the happening of world, but it is also the happening of time and of space as these both arise in and out of the there, the here, the now that already belong to presence. Presence is that gathered, differentiating, bounded, openness and opening that we experience in the very experience of our own presence, which is also always the presence of what is ‘other’, and of the world; a presence that is given in this time, in this place; a presence that we may also call simply ‘being’.

In the experience of the numinous the connection between presence and place, between being and there/here, is central even if not always directly remarked upon. And although Akkach and Powell do not themselves draw explicit attention to what I have here identified as the topological connotations of their title in their introduction to the volume, those connotations nevertheless seem to be at work in important and fundamental ways in the background of their discussion, just as they also appear to be implicitly at work in the various chapters. One might say that the volume is itself made up of series of exploration of numinous fields in each of which a different form of the sacred comes to presence; each of which constitutes a singular ‘placing’ of the sacred.

Moreover, one of the striking features of the volume, quite apart from the range of such fields that it explores, is the way so many of its chapters refer, if not directly to the topological character of the numinous, then to topological and spatial themes and ideas as they are interwoven with different forms and instances of the sacred. This is especially clear in the very first Chapter, with its exploration of the numinous in Australian Indigenous cultures. But it extends through almost every chapter in the volume and across topics that range from garden design in New Zealand and England to Buddhist landscapes in Japan; from 11th-century Islamic science to 20th-century Australian art practice; from the appearance of ritual objects in the context of the modern museum to the way maps, diagrams and music are employed in Patristic understandings of human nature and the cosmos.

It should not be surprising to find a wealth of topological and spatial images and themes at work in a book such as this. It is not just that the specific idea of the numinous, and so also the idea of presence with which it is associated, brings with it notions of place and space. All thinking is characterised by such a topological and spatial orientation so that one cannot begin to think without drawing on ideas and images of place and space. Sensory perception is also inextricably bound up with space and place—to be placed is the basic condition for the possibility of perception—a point that much contemporary neuroscientific work seems to reinforce (even if it sometimes misunderstands exactly what this entails).

The role of topological and spatial images and ideas in thinking, in particular, is often taken to be founded in the supposed centrality of topological and spatial (and so also bodily) metaphors.5 Whether it is indeed metaphor that is at work here, however, or whether the way place and space figure in thinking is indicative of something that comes before any distinction of the metaphorical from the literal is not a question whose answer should simply be assumed (much the same might be said in relation to talk of the symbolic also).

Yet leaving the latter question aside, it is remarkable how much topological and spatial elements figure, implicitly and explicitly, throughout the chapters that make up this volume: there are discussions of landscapes, gardens, mountains, trees, and springs as well as bodily forms and sites of ritual or performances; the role of maps, diagrams, and other representations of place is explored; topological and spatial ideas and images appear in examples from weaving and music (the spatiality of sound is an important if sometimes neglected phenomenon); and the consideration of nature, especially natural elements such as air and water, inevitably moves in close proximity to the consideration of place (such elements being themselves elements of place no less than of ‘nature’). These different points of focus across the various chapters result in prominence being given to different topological and spatial aspects and features as well as to ideas of relationality, activity, and dynamicity that are themselves closely tied up with the character of place.

In this latter respect, the commonplace tendency to look to places as static structures or locales that perdure in the face of change, while it undoubtedly reflects the abiding character of place (something especially evident in Indigenous conceptions and undoubtedly a significant feature of the experience of place more broadly), is also indicative of a frequent tendency to treat place as if it were some sort of secure shelter that would insulate us from the world. The reality is that place is that through which we enter into the world—it is the origin of the world as it is the original site of encounter and of presence. One might also say that it is the threshold of the world.

Understood as such a threshold, place is essentially liminal and this liminality (which can be understood as a form of ‘between-ness’) is also at work in the experience of the sacred and the numinous. Place is thus never static but is rather characterised by a shimmering iridescence that is the iridescence of appearing, of being, of presence—an iridescence that oscillates between self and other, near and far, familiar and strange. Such iridescence, which may also be construed, in acoustic terms, as reverberation or vibration,6 is itself suggestive of the relational character of the liminal and so also of place. In their dynamicity and liminality, place and being placed involve a constant moving between identity and difference, between unity and multiplicity.

The experience of the numinous is always placed, just as is presence, but place also has an essential numinosity of its own. This is not simply a matter of the numinosity of specific places or the experience of those places (such as might be at issue in certain poetic or artistic responses to places). As should already be evident from my comments earlier, there is a numinosity that belongs to the very character of place or ‘being-placed’. Indeed, one way of explicating what is at issue in the experience of the numinous is as the experience of the sheer placedness of existence.

To be present, or just ‘to be’, is to be in place. But to be in place is also to be given over to the place—to be given over to that which is always, already before us, always already there. Our own being has this character, and as such, it remains always ahead of us as well as behind us, it is our future and our past, it is essentially mysterious, it is that to which we belong at the same time as it is that from which we also stand apart. Even if we remain uncertain as to whether such placedness can be adequate to capture all that is at issue in the sacred, there is surely a sense in which the sacred arises out of a sense of our own being, our own presence, our own being-placed, as itself something given to us, inexplicable and strange, and yet still a gift, and as such emanating from that which transcends our own being even as it is evident only in relation to it. It is partly because our being is, in this way, both that which is closest to us and yet also furthest away—most properly our own and yet also most properly other—that the experience of it is an experience in which are combined both beauty and awe.

The fact that the experience of the numinous so often gives rise to ideas of ineffability is itself a function, in part, of the way numinosity is tied to place. But this is not because we cannot speak of place or the numinous—as if place must stand, along with the numinous, on the other side of language. That neither place nor the numinous stands apart from language is indicated, most simply and directly, by the experience of poetry. Language is not inadequate to place nor to the numinous. Instead, language itself resists the attempt to reduce the experience of place or of the numinous merely to an act of mere propositional categorisation or unique propositional determination. Such reduction misunderstands (and so misuses) language no less than it misunderstands place and the numinous. Language, of course, has its own numinosity, its own shimmering iridescence, and it is just this that poetry draws upon at the same time as it also responds to the placed experience of being, to the placed numinosity of presence (and so genuine poetry is as ‘ineffable’, in just the sense elaborated upon here, as is visual or performative art).

My own approach to this volume has been through the way it opens up the various numinous fields that are the subject of its various chapters, and thereby also, so it seems to me, the way it opens up the topological and spatial character of the many different forms and instances of the sacred. But that does not mean that it is the only way to approach this volume—self-evidently so, given that the focus on the topological and spatial is not something explicitly foregrounded, certainly not in the way I have here, by Akkach and Powell nor by any of the volume’s other contributors. Many readers will find this volume rewarding simply because of the range in the forms and instances of the sacred that it explores and the richness of the various analyses that it contains. The volume is, in this respect, an important testament to the broadening in contemporary discourse around notions of the sacred and to the range of approaches that are now being taken to the phenomena in question.

Part of what the volume also demonstrates, however, even while it emphasises the diversity of ways in which the sacred is taken up across history, geography, and culture, is the character of the sacred as a fundamental element in experience irrespective of such differences and divergences. Here the language of place may have an additional relevance in that the variety that is evident in the way the sacred is perceived and experienced can itself be understood as a reflection of the necessarily placed character of such perception and experience. In that case, part of the difference between what is perceived as sacred by someone kneeling in a medieval church from what is perceived as sacred by someone bathing at a spring, dancing in a desert, prostrating in a mosque, or looking at a painting, mountain, person, or sunset may be a difference in the very places in which such perception occurs, such difference in place being more than a difference in mere ‘setting’ or contingent ‘location’, but intrinsic to the perception, and the event (the ‘taking place’), at issue.

Of course, in that case, the way place and perception connect, and the fundamental relation between place and presence, between place and the sacred, immediately comes into view as a common thread that remains, even while it does not efface the plurality and multiplicity both of perception and of place. More generally, it is one of the achievements of this volume, regardless of the topological and spatial issues that may be at issue, that it also holds together a sense of the unity and multiplicity of the numinous fields that it encompasses, as well as of the various dualities and distinctions across which its explorations range.

Bibliography

  • Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

  • Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

  • Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

  • Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

  • Malpas, Jeff. 2018. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. London: Routledge, 2nd ed.

  • Otto, Rudolf. 1952. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed.

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1

On the idea of philosophical topology or topography that is invoked here, see, for instance, Jeff Malpas, 2018, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (London: Routledge, 2nd ed.).

2

It is worth noting that the English ‘place’ also has similar etymological connotations coming, via Latin, from the Greek πλᾰτῠ́ς (platús), meaning ‘flat or broad’.

3

See Rudolf Otto, 1952, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. by John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed.), 12.

4

Otto, 1952, 11.

5

See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press); see also, Mark Johnson, 1987, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

6

An idea that appears in the work of Gaston Bachelard as well as Martin Heidegger. See: Gaston Bachelard, 1969, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston, Beacon Press), xii–xiii, n. 2 (Bachelard, who uses the French retentissement, takes this idea from Eugène Minkowski); see Martin Heidegger, 2002, Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 37–38 (Heidegger uses the German Schwingung).

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