Sacred Place In Early Medieval Neoplatonism

The twentieth century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively postmodern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This book traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of present-day debates over place and the sacred.

L. Michael Harrington is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Dallas.