The Place of the Spirit: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Location

Place and space has become a topic of theological currency in the late 20th and early 21st century, but its trinitarian implications merit further exploration. In this dissertation, the author contends that trinitarian models encode spatial and placial assumptions, which in turn encode assumptions about God, creation, and intelligibility. The central aim of this study is to tease out the placial and spatial implications of two different episodes in which trinitarian thought has flourished. The author first treats fourth-century trinitarian reflection Ì¢‰âÂ' specifically, that developed by the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) and, as well, by Augustine of Hippo. Bringing these architects of classical trinitarian thought into dialogue with modern placial theorists, the author finds a similar tendency to understand place as having to do with meaning-making, navigation, and the symbolic structuring of a world. Secondly, the author considers contemporary trinitarian soundings Ì¢‰âÂ' and particularly, those conducted in ways sympathetic to the classical tradition and to continental philosophy. Here the author engages two interlocutors, JÌÄå_rgen Moltmann and the early Jean-Luc Marion. In Moltmann's case, the author finds that the later Moltmann in particular gives theological heft to place and space, but that his placial aims are frustrated by his more fundamental requirement that place function as a preconstituted domain or horizon. Turning to Jean-Luc Marion's earlier and more explicitly theological works, the author argues that the significance he gives to place Ì¢‰âÂ' and particularly to distance Ì¢‰âÂ' creates problems for his trinitarian model, effectively demoting the Spirit. The study concludes by imagining ways in which the strengths of all the models Ì¢‰âÂ' ancient and contemporary, theological and placial Ì¢‰âÂ' might mutually correct each other, and thereby give a coherent trinitarian theology of place.