Abstract
For human being there are principally three ways of inhabiting the space. The first one is human dwelling within landscapes of this world, second is common inhabitation of places in these landscapes through participation in human society (polis), and finally the third way is religious, or from Christian point of view, ecclesial way of inhabitation, because such life perspective is shaped by participation in the believing community.
All three ways of inhabiting the space are not excluding others. On the contrary, they can, and often also are in mutual complementarity.
This chapter is focused on the first way mentioned above and introduces human being as creature in the space, who is concretized by terms as place and landscape. These terms include not only natural space for human life, but also culture and religion as other decisive factors for shapes and purpose of specific landscapes and their places.
Landscapes represent meeting point of the abstract space with concrete places, encounter of nature with culture and religion. Human being plays key role in such encounter through inhabiting landscapes by filling them with stories, giving them meaning, storing his/her memory in there, and sharing experiences within their contexts.
Introducing human-landscape relationship in this way, points out landscape as environment of multilayered encounters (human-landscape, human-human, God-human). Such considerations lead naturally towards exploring human creativity manifesting itself in context of the landscape.
In theological perspective, human creativity is linked with God's creative power. Human creative abilities are rooted in creativity of the divine Creator.
In this perspective, landscape appears as witness to human-Divine co-action within the world. This brings us towards the topic of landscape's memory which brings us to concluding part meditating upon human being searching and finding his/her home in the landscape.
From the perspective of Christian faith, these homes are a certain foretaste, sign and promise of the eternal home in eschatological landscape of the new creation.