Where is God? No one has ever seen Him, yet many look for Him and believe they will find Him. He resides in humankind’s myths, dreams, and projects. From the most remote folds of time and from the deepest recesses of the unconscious, His silence has spoken to us in infinite ways. We perceive Him in the mysteries of nature, in the wonder of art, and indeed every time we see a light and hear His power vibrate from beyond the boundaries of the visible and the comprehensible. Humankind’s spasmodic search for an imagined and hoped-for Divine leads the author to identify tangible accounts of how God is present in the works of man, especially in architectural forms that have often been lost, misunderstood, and forgotten: the Sanctuary, the Temple, the Synagogue, the Cathedral, the Mosque. But God can also be detected, more indirectly, in other shrines, venues of worship, and sacred places. This is perhaps Cardini’s most intense book, for it introduces readers to eternal settings on a human scale.

Franco Cardini is professor emeritus of Medieval History at the Italian Institute of Human and Social Sciences (Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa), research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and a Harvard University fellow.