A Place of Encounter with a Divine. Heidegger on the Spatiality of Religious Experience

Abstract

The paper explores how different models of space articulate the nature of religious experience. Analyses are focused primarily on Heidegger’s phenomenology. Throughout his work, three models of space are determined: an opened, an empty, and a topological space. According to these models, there are three types of sacred places, that is, places of encounter with Divine: 1. a sacred place defined by coordinates materialized in a sacred building or symbolized by a cultic procedure; 2. a negative place, a place of a negative form of encounter; 3. a place as a path-mark, defined by a transitive (wayfaring) involvement into a lived environment.

Keywords

• phenomenology of religious experience
• sacred place
• phenomenology of space
• phenomenological topology
• heidegger