Everyone agrees, from the most implacable sceptic to the most passionate religious devotee, that there is nothing philosophically problematic about religious belief. However puzzling to some people, it is a widespread feature of human life. But whether such belief can ever amount to knowledge is a much more contentious matter, and accordingly religious epistemology has always been an important area in the philosophy of religion, one that has figured prominently in its recent revival within analytic philosophy.

As the subtitle indicates, Faith and Place is a contribution to this subject. To determine whether knowledge of God is possible, of course, we need to be clear about the nature of knowledge in general, and this requirement provides the book with its context. Mark Wynn holds that contemporary debates in religious epistemology have largely been shaped by an almost exclusive attention to just one conception of what counts as knowledge, namely the kind of theory construction and empirical observation characteristic of the natural sciences. It is knowledge so conceived that underlies much of the science/religion debate, where sceptics deny and apologists assert that religious belief can meet the criteria established by physics and biology.

Arguably, however, this assumption – that science provides an epistemological standard which religion must emulate if it is not to retreat to the realms of mere ‘feeling’ – is not only distorting, but sets up insurmountable obstacles in the way of understanding the true nature of the claims to knowledge of the divine that the world's religions make. As a counter to this prejudice, and as a possible source of greater illumination, Wynn invites us to think at length about a different kind of knowledge – knowledge of place. His central contention (of which he provides several formulations), is ‘that knowledge of place offers a richer analogue for knowledge of God than do some of the alternatives (based on perception and scientific theory construction) which have been canvassed in recent discussion in the philosophy of religion’ (133). ‘Knowledge of place’, he tells us at the outset, ‘consists at least in part, in an embodied, practical and, very often, theoretically inarticulate responsiveness to a given region of space’ (8). This makes it a more promising analogue if, as he holds, ‘knowledge of God, in the theologically or religiously interesting sense, involves a commitment of the person in their affective-practical-cognitive integrity’ (9).

In elaborating his thesis and defending it against potential objections, Wynn draws on two principal sources. One is – broadly speaking – phenomenological, which is to say, literary accounts of the ‘existential meaning’ of place as experienced by certain individuals. Here the writings of Wendel Berry, R. S. Thomas and others provide the book with material, but Wynn's main recourse is to the poet Edmund Cusick, whose relationship with the author is a recurring theme throughout the book. Secondly, he draws extensively on analyses of knowledge of place by a number of philosophical writers, notably three from the ‘continental’ tradition – Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu. Building on phenomenology and philosophical analysis, Wynn contends that places are ‘supra-individuals’. That is to say, a place is not simply the sum of the spatial items that it incorporates, but neither is it properly interpreted as a further spatial ‘entity’, additional to those that it encloses. In some way, a ‘place’ has an individuality different in kind to the individual objects (natural or constructed) within it. Wynn captures this idea with the concept of a ‘supra-individual’. Knowledge of place, then, should be understood as personal familiarity with the distinguishing ‘atmosphere’ of a supra-individual. We can call this the genius loci or ‘spirit of the place’, but to grasp the idea properly, this expression has to be understood metaphysically rather than figuratively.

The connection with religion is not far to seek. First ‘a particular place can body forth the meaning of human experience’ (38). Second, a site can ‘acquire religious significance by way of a recognition that it carries some microcosmic significance’ (ibid.). Third, ‘places are significant as the bearers of history’, and this will ‘provide an understanding of the religious significance of a place most straightforwardly when the events in question are themselves of religious importance’ (40–41). In addition to such religious associations, there is also a more direct analogue with knowledge of God. ‘[P]laces have the sort of individuality that we associate with persons’ (56). ‘[This] openness of places to personification is a deep and pervasive feature of our relationship to them’, and means that ‘a placial formulation of the doctrine of divine supra-individuality may well be better equipped to meet … concerns about divine personhood than is Aquinas's version of the doctrine’ (59). That is to say, theology needs to give an account of God's relationship to the world that does not make Him just another object at some remove from it. He must be a ‘supra-individual’ and this is just what the analogue with a genus loci can illuminate.

In later chapters, Wynn applies his account of knowledge of place and its theological significance to three related topics – the nature and meaning of pilgrimage, the religious significance of specific holy places and sacred buildings, and the resonances between religious and aesthetic (especially poetic) descriptions of place. In ‘Some concluding thoughts’ he briefly connects his themes with those of two other theologians who have written important and influential works on closely related topics – Friedrich von Hügel in The Mystical Element and, rather more recently, David Brown in God and the Enchantment of Place. The book's last word is then given once more to the poetry of the late Edmund Cusick.

I began reading this book with enthusiasm for the project it outlines, and a positive desire that it should succeed. So it was with considerable disappointment that, as the book proceeded, I found its thesis less and less clear, its strategy increasingly uncertain, and its arguments not so convincing. Consider first Wynn's thesis. I wholly concur in his assertion that there is (as he puts it) an ‘affective-practical-cognitive integrity’ to religious belief that scientific knowledge lacks. Religion is all about telling us (and showing us) how to live a worthwhile human life; science has nothing to say (or to reveal) on this subject. So, however epistemologically robust scientific knowledge may be, it can't provide much of a model for knowledge of God. Wynn is also right, I think, to hold that knowledge of places is intriguingly different to other kinds of knowledge, and that it has been almost completely neglected by epistemologists.

However, whereas at the outset his aim seems to be the exploration and defence of an analogy, uncertainty about this soon sets in. Is it is an analogy with or an analysis of knowledge of God that he thinks knowledge of place provides? The uncertainty is especially evident in two summaries that he offers some way into the book:

On a straightforward interpretation, the earlier passage moves quite illicitly – rather than ‘more exactly’ – from an analogy between concepts to an identity between natures. Similarly, far from the second of Wynn's contentions in the later passage being a ‘more exact’ formulation of the first, it seems to me a quite different (and much less plausible) claim, and one that no amount of comparison could establish.

Even if there were not this ambiguity in the thesis, I would have questions about aspects of his argumentative strategy. The book begins with a letter written by a friend to the dying Edmund Cusick in which the environs that they both knew as students at Oxford are recalled. The details of this letter are reverted to at regular intervals throughout the book. Insofar as the purpose of this is to illustrate a philosophical thesis about possibilities it is unobjectionable – though whether or not illustration of this kind is illuminating depends upon reader response more than it does on authorial intention. But even if a letter like this does genuinely illuminate the thesis, it is not evidence for it, of course, still less some species of proof. Were a single letter to be used as more than illustration, this would constitute a rather drastic case of generalizing from a single instance. For a long time Wynn appears to be fully aware of this, and then suddenly he does seem to treat the illustration as evidence. In the fifth chapter, he ‘reconstructs’ a thought from Bachelard by appeal to ‘the experience of Edmund and his friend’. Then expressly declaring that he is ‘generalizing from this case’ he moves to the very ambitious philosophical thesis that ‘knowledge of space does indeed precede knowledge of time’ (103).

On the face of it, this looks like a logical ‘howler’. It led me to peruse more closely other argumentative connections that Wynn makes, and to conclude that this is not the only instance of his treating illustration as evidence. In chapter 7 he proposes to ‘test the fruitfulness’ of the models of ‘religious significance’ against ‘a range of test cases’. The first of these is Wendel Berry's extended account of his sensual experience of Red River Gorge in Kentucky. Leaving aside this all important question – why should we regard Berry's experience as having the status of a ‘test case’? – we find that what it actually provides is not a test at all, but a very indirect kind of confirmation.

Does ‘meshing very directly’ mean that they do not contradict each other, or that one implies the other, or that they offer each other mutual evidential support? What logical force does ‘suggestion’ of this kind bring with it, and why is the extension from religious to ‘existential’ meaning not a version of the fallacy of affirming the consequent? Nor do Wynn's negative arguments look much more robust. For instance, he describes himself as ‘resisting a narrowly empiricist reading’. Does ‘resisting’ signal his own psychological reluctance, or does it gesture towards some rational ground? And does he mean to say that a less ‘narrow’ empiricism would be viable? At another point he objects to an argument in Karstin Harries's book, The Ethical Function of Architecture, with the comment that ‘[t]heologians are unlikely to warm to a view of this kind’ (93). Is this intended as a counter to it? If so, my immediate response is that ‘philosophers will not warm to reasoning of this kind’.

Wynn's book exhibits a great deal of thought as well as wide reading, and he has hit upon an interesting, novel, and potentially fruitful idea. It is all the more regrettable, therefore that (in my estimation at any rate) the explication of this idea lacks the clarity and rigour that would make the book a compelling contribution to current debates. There are, of course, differences between disciplines. Theologians and literary interpreters often think that philosophers lay too much emphasis on conceptual clarity and argumentative rigour, so it may be that my assessment of the book is based on disciplinary standards that are not entirely appropriate to it. But if, as I think, epistemology could indeed learn important lessons from closer attention to knowledge of place, this will require another book rather different from this one.