## Re-spatializing: Space-walking the Stars, a Multitude of Horizons

To stand on the ground beneath our feet; to sit in silence, tears and prayers is not, and have never been, to be *still*. Instead, we careen on our wet rock through the black fabric of space and time. As solid as it may seem, the ground is not static. It is dynamic to the highest degree. This cosmic orb is not only our spaceship through the vastness of being, but the orb itself twists like a whirling dervish, and the plates shift under the pads of our feet while the ground sifts through the cracks between our skin. If there is a substantive metaphysics available for the contemporary person it probably will not be erected on concrete, but either plastic or quicksand.

Heralding the end of the metaphysics of presence is to embrace the basic instability of existence. But recognizing that being is not a 'stable' definitive structure does not require us to lose our footing as it so often does. Instead, it invites a metaphysics which accounts for the motion of being, shifting from static architectonics to tropes of movements and directionality. Embracing a metaphysics of movement upsets the dualism of stable-unstable conceptualizations of being. Rather, to find ones footing while in motion, while space-walking, is to stand on the shifting ground and 'take heed lest we fall.' But how exactly does one begin to find their footing while moving on moving ground? Or floating through bottomless space?

This space exploration departs from here, where we can set a heading with regard to being and its horizons. Opening with our primary interlocutor—Paul Tillich—will help to more precisely identify the conceptual territory and its primary stakes.

> The creative process of the divine life precedes the differentiation between essences and existents. In the creative vision of God the individual is present as a whole in his essential being and inner *telos* and, at the same time, in the infinity of the special moments of his life-process. Of course, this is said symbolically, since we are unable to have a perception or even an imagination of that which belongs to the divine life. The mystery of being beyond essence and existence is hidden in the mystery of the creativity of the divine life.[^1]

Tillich departs from Aquinas by conceiving of God as that which is "*beyond*" essence and existence (rather than the unity of essence and existence).[^2] The result is twofold: on one hand, Tillich sweeps the rug out from under the traditional praxis of "metaphysics of presence." If "the mystery of being beyond essence and existence" is hidden in the divine life, than ontology itself is a practice which is fundamentally groundless. On the other hand, Tillich gestures toward a novel way for conceptualizing the divine life ontologically (and the cosmos as a result). Typified in the discrepancy between Barth and Tillich, theology as a whole is faced with the problem of delimiting the human religious experience in a way which resists conflating the divine and human.

This mystery, that the divine life is somehow both wholly other and radically immanent, is a function of the phenomenality of the human *qua* being. It is the groundlessness of Tillich's ground of being, rooted in the Tillichian paradox that somehow 'being-itself' is beyond *being* all together. The "mystery of being beyond essence and existence" is concealed because it is beyond the horizon of being which is a result of our existence as being. To draw on Gadamer, being is the "situation" in which we have come to ourselves. Being *is* "a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision" like Adam and Eve in Milton's paradise.[^3] Initially, like Eve, we draw to "the murmuring sound" she hears from "not distant far" (4.453).[^4] The murmuring of the water breaks into the situation from beyond the horizon, and draws her toward it, expanding the horizon itself.[^5] For Gadamer, this standpoint is delimited by temporality and "the finite present." Both Gadamer and Tillich react against over-determining existentialist interpretations of temporality typified by classical existentialism (e.g. in Heidegger) albeit in slightly different ways.[^6] But as Gadamer says elsewhere—and Tillich would undoubtedly agree—"'reality' always stands in a horizon of [...] still undecided future possibilities."[^7] The trajectory of this exploration, however is not through time, but space. Before introducing the major movements of this analysis, its helpful to take a detour to demarcate the situation which guides our ultimate concern.[^8]

## A preliminary situational novae

There is a knot to untie in the above passage. Tillich represents the individual's presence "*as* *a whole* in his essential being" in the divine life of God beyond the horizon of being. That is, if as Tillich implies the essential being is present as a whole in the creative vision of the divine life, and yet God-self occupies a mysterious space *beyond the horizon of being—*that "God does not *exist*"— then "where" (to improvise on Tillich's spatial melody) and how is an individual *essence* related spatially to what is beyond-being?[^9] Since this analysis departs primarily from Tillich, it seems appropriate to allow some space to exposit the cultural situation.[^10]

This guiding existential 'concern' is not what, or who, but *where* am I? We are no longer 'thrown' into a garden of serenity like Milton's Adam and Eve with the heavens of God atop our heads. Instead we come to ourselves like toys strapped to a satellite hurdling through the vacuum of space.[^11] The question of presence (that is, space) is an—I would argue *the*—anxiety which *concerns* the individual of the age. At the very least, it is for me, which one can suppose makes it more than sufficient cause for this analysis.[^12]

The onset of cybernetic consciousness introduced a new level a disembodied presence to the human experience which inspires fear and trembling in *Da-*sein. It is quite accurately identified in the anxiety I feel when my mother laments that she phones me, but '*I am not there*.' She implores, 'I need *you* to *be there* when I call.' And my anxiety whispers back: *'*I was never *there.* I can't *be* everywhere*,* I am *here.* Just *here.'* The *telephone* is there, my voice may be there when I answer— which, *I do*, just to be perfectly clear—my laughter or opinion may break in to her through the vibration of a piezoelectric diaphragm, but I am not. Neither technologies of self, nor the mediated or curated self are new to technology, but the blossoming saturation of the virtual-social world over the past three decades inflicts us with more than an acute sense of vertigo. What is 'space' in an increasingly virtual world? We've wondered, griped and eulogized, but we may lack the courage to think the thought whole: where *are you* when you leave the room through the window in your pocket? Were you ever in the room to begin with? Because you've checked your phone and now you're certainly not here. Brick and plaster will not keep dreamers from stealing to castles in the air, but they suffice for the 'awful cells' which captivate Eloisa and Abelard. Pope's romance of letters dissolves with the 'relentless walls,' without the lovers taken captive by the space which lays within and before the horizon of the belovéd.

When the Hubble was shot into space, it pierced the heart of Apollo with an arrow loosed from his own quiver. With a telescopic gaze further into the celestial hue than Dante could ever dream possible, we come to ourselves, blind and concussed on a rocky shore, seeing stars—duplicitous ones. And in solidarity with Boethius lament:

> He who has seen into Nature's secrets  
> now lies prostrate, his mind bowed down  
> by heavy chains that hang from his neck.  
> With eyes cast down thus, he can see  
> nothing but dull, brown earth before him. (2.21-25)[^13]

The telescoping vision robbed us of what must have been one of the richest luxuries afforded the pre-modern person: a gaze into heaven itself. The sun now also is deposed from its cardinal office in the cosmos—and *sic semper tyrannis*. The primal source of warmth, light, and life-force and still it dies too, a fading star among many already dead. The dark humor of the current technological age is that in traversing 'the final frontier' we have robbed ourselves of the heavens as frontier itself, and so the earth as a rock meandering through 'space' is rendered space-less in the process. In breaching the stratosphere of our celestial terrace, the horizon has collapsed and the earth has fallen from beneath our feet.

Anxiety toward death was displaced following 20th century war-consciousness by something that appears to me somewhat more precarious: anxiety toward life-before-death. The blood dappled shroud of Prince Prospero's intruder lays flippantly on youthful skin.[^14] Though it is a black irony that unites *yolo* and *fomo—*everything burns, so its not a matter of *if* but *how*. If this 'life' is our space in a network of matter-energy that inevitably will be 'consumed,' life's only value lies in how we consume it. If, in Tillich's words, to "not to have space is not to be," then the person of the age finding no space under the black edge beyond the stars is—like the sun—already dead.[^15] A theology of the age doesn't need to overcome death, it needs to give deeper meaning—or really any meaning at all—to Neil de Grasse Tyson's naïve 'stardust.'

There are a variety of philosophical and theological reasons for this which should be held to account for the legacy of Western thought coiling into Ouroboros. But for brevity sake, it suffices to underline the primary *theological* question at play: where is our *space* in the divine life? This is a theological way to ask the seemingly facile question—*where am I*? Satellites like angels in cubicles triangulate my position anywhere on this globe, but I have only cold, dead stars to pinpoint my own space in the life beyond, uncircumscribed by the black edge of the universe.

This thesis is an outpouring which irrupts from a place a existential anxiety. In this way, it is correlational theology the trajectory of which is fueled by its ultimate concern, that is God. The goal is not to radically challenge any existing theological systematics, but to draw on them in concert with other art and phenomenology, cross-reading thought against thought to push and pull on the metaphors traditionally used to conceive of the divine life. The horizon of this assessment is to respatialize being within the divine life, and consequently the individual's life in the process. What lays beyond the horizon of this assessment is the possibility of conceptualizing an onto-theology of motion which can provide a concrete—or rather, plastic—metaphysics on which the contemporary person can find their footing.

The first step will be, departing from trends in hermeneutical theology and drawing on Gadamer, to recast Tillich's ontology spatially. Tillich's reconsideration of non-being as dependent on being is fruitful in relation to the concerns of the classical existentialists. But instead of *non*-being, *beyond*-being provides a symbol for conceptualizing the divine life which tangibly spatializes the real material experience of the individual. The horizon of being stands between us and what is beyond-being. Death serves as an example where the horizon of being is misunderstood by classical existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger as a result is over-determined in its governing relationship to being. Although the horizon of being we see in death can be misinterpreted as tyrannical, it is also the original source of the gift.

The second step will be our first movement into space with the poet Dante in an attempt to force a shift in the focus from temporality to spatiality. The very presence of the horizon of being insinuates itself as a gift from what is beyond-being. Our space as situatedness comes *from* the presence of the horizon itself, both the horizon of being, and our experience of those horizons in everyday life from art to the other. Dante's stars are also our stars—the stars as a horizon of being from which our space is given by the nature of what they insinuate beyond.

Lunging into the third step will make them a concerted dive into the horizon of being as an icon of the divine. Tillich's notion of the divine and Marion's concept of the icon reveal an onto-theological basic for this divine aesthetic. Horizons exist not only at the edge of the deep black tapestry above our heads but in the very eyes of the other and the glass eyes we create in art to peer into the beyond. The horizon of being from which I derive my own space is the same horizon which I discover in the other. The Trinity is the ultimate icon of being in the precise sense that the Trinity is God beyond God. Being, therefore, is an open economy by the nature of its birth from the begetting motion of the Trinity, its location *in* beyond-being and orientation *toward* the horizon of being.

## Beyond 'non-' and death; horizon as gift of gift

The phenomenal disposition exposes an insufficiency with philosophical terminology of being, particularly when it comes up against *non*-being. Although this appears at first to be a petty dispute over the nature of a symbol, it will highlight a necessary change which the discussion of being and its metaphors can take in order to relate concretely to the human experience.[^16] Tillich holds this up as central to his ultimate concern, and as a result, the unconditional point of departure for his correlational theology. The distinction becomes fundamental in the answer the *kergyma* gives to his question. But, to ask the absolute question *'why is there something and not nothing?'*—as Tillich does in the opening to his systematics, and as the question is so often posed nowadays—is a fool's errand: a rhetorical snipe hunt for the uninitiated philosopher. The catcher is tricked into waiting in the dark for no one to scare nothing into his very real net.[^17]

'Nothingness,' and 'non-being' (*ouk on* or *me on*) are from the beginning euphemisms for something fundamentally outside of phenomenal experience.[^18] These euphemisms *may* be helpful, insofar as they do not over-determine the quality of their relation to human life by attempting to delimit something which no phenomenal basis by their very nature. When Parmenides says, "non-being is what is not" is not merely tautological, for it cannot even suspend itself in logic long enough to be confirmed a tautology.[^19] As Tillich shows sufficiently, non-being can only be understood only in its inextricable relationship to being. Here in lies the root of his criticism of the classical existentialists which is shared in large part by Gadamer: they afford non-being an ontological priority which it does not deserve.[^20] Tillich particularly does us a transitional service by recasting the notion of 'non-being' and 'nothingness' in such a light as to break the way it is over-determined by Heidegger and Sartre. But why then, continue leaning on a broken euphemism which fails to serve its metaphorical purpose?

Tillich proceeds from the original fact [*Ur-Tatsache*] that "there is *something* and not *nothing*."[^21] Jean-Luc Marion helps us to augment this *ur-tatsache* in relation to God revealed through incarnation:

> [...] the ontic difference between being and nonbeing indeed intervenes, located in the shadow of the kerygma; however, it no longer functions according to the norms of being but to those of operators (faith, call, as if) that, far from slipping into this ontic difference, make it appear indifferent, though leaving it intact.

Drawing on the Apostle Paul's radical 'wisdom of the foolish' and 'strength of the weak,' (1 Cor. 1) Marion uses scripture to dissolve the classical Greek distinction between Being, being and non-being which occurs as a result of the incarnation.[^22] So by framing it in slightly differently language, the absolute question is dispelled by a more apparent reality governed by augmenting the *ur-tatsache* from a phenomenological viewpoint within the horizon of being: *there is something*. This leads us to a point of departure for phenomenological onto-theology: I cannot see beyond the horizon, but that I cannot see it does not imply its *non*-being, but its *beyond*-being.[^23] Ideally, this phenomenological shift in onto-theology can end the snipe hunt hazing ritual that begins with puzzling over "why *is* there something and not nothing?" (Like the snipe, there is an actual bird out there.)

An objection might still be raised, now from a phenomenological perspective, how can we confirm that there is "something" rather than "nothing" (*kenon,* or the void) beyond the horizon of being? This might apply to being in the 'future' (e.g. the universe collapsing on itself), being in the 'past' (e.g. "before" *creatio ex nihilo*, "before" the singularity), etc. But the contradiction is precisely this: our situation within being is such that we cannot conceive of any reality apart from it. The "concealedness" of "not-yet-being" and "being-no-more" can be mistaken as non-existence (*ouk* *on*).[^24] Its as though our lack of object-permanence haunts us into adulthood—call it, a lack of being-permanence. Columbus' sailors did not fear plunging their ships into some abyss off the edge of the earth, they feared a journey so deep into the unknown they might not return.

This extends quite precisely into the metaphor of life and death. Recall the popular funeral platitude: "death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight."[^25] It is a kind of tyranny of our situatedness within life that we cannot conceive of what is beyond life. As a result, we use categories of being in order to conceive of the experience of death when we look at a corpse as though it is now "empty of life."[^26] But the "emptiness"—as "nothingness" is to being—is a misinterpretation of what is "beyond" precisely because we cannot ourselves also be situated in the beyond of the horizon at which we gaze. The beyond phenomenologically strikes us as "empty," (as Gadamer says "still undecided future possibilities") by its concealedness but it is only because we are not situated there (and cannot be by the very virtue of the beyond). Derrida, drawing on Levinas, identifies this precise error in Heidegger:

> Levinas not only reproaches Heidegger for the fact that the *Dasein* is argued from the privileged position of its own death but because it gives itself death as a simple annihilation, a passage to nonbeing, which amounts to inscribing the gift of death as being-towards-death within the horizon of the question of being.[^27]

This is consonant with Tillich's critique of the existentialist mistake in Heidegger and Sartre: "Somehow [recent existentialism] has replaced being-itself by non-being, giving to nonbeing a positivity and a power which contradict the immediate meaning of the word."[^28] The immediate meaning of the word, as Tillich argues, is that non-being only has meaning in philosophical relationship to being, not the other way around.[^29]

If one or two bits of interest can be gained usuriously from the *donner le mort*, it is that there is not only a tyranny, but a double gift given in this horizon which obcures our vision from within the situation of life and being (we will later return to this horizon alongside the pilgrim Dante). But like Columbus' sailors, they did not need to fear sailing off the edge from the apparent likelihood that the earth was round—as one moves toward the horizon, the beyond continues revealing itself.[^30] The horizon is both a gift, and brings the gift *qua* gift into being.[^31] Without situatedness, without the horizon of being, we could not receive what is beyond *as* gift. The horizon is given as gift in order that the (or any) gift may *be qua* gift.

Drawing the threads together, Tillich offers an effective mechanism for conceptualizing the ontological priority of being over non-being and the process of God as the triumph of being over nonbeing. However, there is a more effective phenomenological treatment of this creative fecundity which we observe as part of the divine life (and from our relation to it) which more fruitfully gestures toward an open metaphysics in which the individual is spatialized and situated concretely. The supra-abundance we observe is not a result of an ongoing ontological process which overcomes the very presence of non-being within itself, but rather, as a result of the super-ontological nature of God which is-beyond always at a phenomenological horizon given as gift to the creature *qua* situatedness within the divine life.

It is in the same sense that the metaphor of finiteness can be reconstituted within a non-dual onto-theology by recognizing the gift given to the creature *qua* situated. Seen in this light, if finitude *is* what compels the anxiety of being by the threat of 'nothingness' or 'meaninglessness' it is also what *gives* the absolute blessing. The threat of 'nothingness' that comes on to us as the horizon of death, suffers from the same euphemistic acrobatics as non-being. From a phenomenological outlook, death appears as a horizon upon which is nothingness, meaningless, condemnation because— at least in large part—of what we infer from the phenomenon of observing something move beyond a horizon. This existentialism is quite simply an adult version of the anxiety of being-permanence. But from the strict phenomenality of life—like the phenomenality of being—there is a consonant pre-rational recognition that "there is," or "I am." In this way the 'courage to be' is not overcoming an essence of 'nothing' or 'non-being' within us, but in a more hermeneutical way, a courage which inspires us to move toward the horizons that obscure what is beyond.

## Dante at the edge; the horizon of being

If the reader opts to take the whole journey from start to finish with Dante, by the time the pilgrim reaches the edge of the Starry Sphere (*Pd.* 27) from his opening in the *selva obscura (In.* *1.2)*, one ceases *reading* the *Divine Comedy* and proceeds only by weeping through it. It is the stars which orients Dante's journey from, in and through being and the beyond. His works for us begin first as stars themselves, as the end each end with the *stelle*, serve as theopoetics which orient us toward the horizon. He moves in and through the stars that are the many others who reflect the primal point of light itself, and leave him oriented toward God. Dante's stars then, are also our stars in a twofold sense and outline the last two movements of this exploration.

First, the stars are the points of light which hover nightly at the edge of the vast blackness of our universe. Whether they are literally at 'the edge' or not makes no difference, as far as our gaze is concerned they occupy the horizon of being. As far as we have been able to travel into space (and will continue to) there will always be points of light which occupy the horizon beyond. They serve as icons of the God that is beyond the material universe and yet, as Marion would put it, is indifferent to the difference between our material universe and what lies beyond its edge. In this sense these stars spatialize us as they insinuate what is beyond themselves as horizons, and therefore orient us towards it.

Second, the stars are the point of light that Dante see's reflected in the eye of Beatrice. Dante first see's Love in his earthly Beatrice:

> From her eyes, as she moves them,  
> issue spirits ablaze with love,  
> which pierce the eyes of those who gaze on her then,  
> and pass within so each one finds the heart:  
> you will see Love pictured in her face,  
> there where no man may fixedly gaze.[^32]

And as she herself descends from the Empyrean only to bring the pilgrim up, so she never wholly departs from her place in the rose of Paradise. Just as Dante fails to fix his gaze upon Godself in the final Canto, so does the horizon in the other represent the horizon of being.

After finishing his time with Peter, Dante watches the host like flakes "snowing themselves back home," into the Empyrean (*Pd.* 27.67-72).[^33] Even at the edge of the stars themselves he is subjected to the horizon of being: "My eyes were following their forms / and followed them until the wider intervening space / made me unable to pursue them higher" (*Pd.* 27.73-75). Although they are subsistent form they disappear beyond the space between the Starry Sphere and Crystalline Sphere. Standing at the edge of the stars, Dante's gaze still cannot fall beyond the horizon. And yet, Beatrice reminds him once more to "cast [his] sight below," (*Pd.* 27.77) and observe the earth "beneath [his] feet" (*Pd.* 22.129, 151-154; 27.85-87).[^34]

Dante is that man who Boethius writes of "who once walked the paths of heaven / on solid ground under open skies" (2.5-6).[^35] Dante is space-walking with the earth beneath his feet. It is when his eyes fall finally upon the final horizon of the heavenly spheres that he again sees the ground below him. This is, as Beatrice says, only possible because Dante is "so *near* to the final blessedness," that his eyes have been made "clear and keen" (*Pd.* 22.124-126) enough to gaze into the sun itself. His gaze set upon the horizon of being *spatializes* Dante. Dante's awareness of his spatiality is constituted precisely by the *closeness* of God—although God still lies beyond the horizon.[^36] This is the circumspective nature of *de-severing* [ent-fernung] as bringing-close "the farness of the ready-to-hand" which we "can *never cross over*."[^37] What is beyond the horizon of being is that which is ready-to-hand but can never be brought-to-hand—to be more precise, divine life beyond-being has no "place." Heidegger's spatial acrobatics offer us a helpful way to understand Dante's situatedness:

> Dasein understands its "here" [Hier] in terms of its environmental "yonder." The "here" does not mean the "where" of something present-at-hand, but rather "whereat" [Wobei] of a deseverant Being-alongside, together with this de-severance. Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, *is proximally never here but yonder*; *from this " yonder" it comes back to its* *"here;"* and it comes back to its "here" only in the way in which it interprets its concernful Being-towards in terms of what is ready-to-hand yonder.[^38]

How does this apply to the horizon of being? Or to put it differently: how does one de-sever the divine life which is is always yonder ready-to-hand, but never brought-to-hand? It seems that the same circumspection still applies in this case: that to set one's gaze upon the horizon of being is *to* *be* 'concernfully' oriented toward it (that is its *directionality* [Ausrichtung]) and discover oneself both here and yonder. The divine life has no "place," but *we* are spatialized in our concernful 'Beingtowards' the horizon. And so we return to our pilgrim—but *where* is he?

By Beatrice's divine beauty Dante is once again is thrust "into heaven's swiftest sphere" (*Pd.* 27.99). In the Crystalline Sphere Beatrice anticipating Dante's question explains, "The nature of the universe, which holds / the center still and moves all else around it, / starts *here* as from its *boundary line*" (*Pd.* 27.106-108). Dante and Beatrice, now stand at the edge of universe—upon the very horizon of being. "This heaven," Beatrice continues, "has no other *where* / but in the mind of God" (*Pd.* 27.109-110). They stand on the very boundary line which has *no other where* but in the mind of God. It does not have a *where* as you as I have *wheres.* That is, both a 'here' and also a 'yonder' in the mind of God as she later relates, "where every *ubi* [where] and every *quando* [when] has its center."

This horizon of being itself, on which they stand together, is understood as a location born only in the mind of God. But it is, as Beatrice explains, the central location which gives all else "space." This horizon of being is the gift of God by which we are *situated* in the divine life beyond-being. This horizon is the gift by which we are *spatialized* in the divine life. More significantly, the horizon is the absolute *gift* of *gift*. It is the nature of the being situated within the beyond which enables the capacity for the gift without 'reappropriation.'[^39] Without a horizon no *gift* can be given. It is the horizon, that makes our directionality toward the impossible, possible. Because of this Caputo can say (with strikingly spatializing metaphors), "let us be driven by, impelled by, set into motion by, impassioned by this impossible desire, this desire for the impossible gift, for *the* impossible."[^40] The ever-present messianic structures (whether they are observed as weak or 'strong') and potentialities of being are buttressed and insinuated by the ever-present existence of the horizon. The following section returns to the import of this.

But we are confronted by a significant difficulty with regard to Beatrice's word (as well the paradox of the circumspection of de-severence in Heidegger when considered with regard to what is beyond-being). Consider briefly the ontological-logic of the Divine Comedy; in Beatrice's words, every "where" has its center in the mind of God, but this "where" lies also beyond the "boundary line"—the horizon of being. This is the existential anxiety of spatiality alluded to in the beginning with Tillich's mystery. That my "where" lies beyond the very horizon of being to which I am directed—in space, chasing space. Even on my best days this space-walking pails in comparison to Dante's. When I look down, there is no earth; and when I look up, no heaven. I look to the stars and see the horizon of being, but when I look into myself, I see the same horizon. As far as my microscopic and telescopic gaze may penetrate, if I am honest with myself, I see horizons everywhere I look: the quantum field, the psyche of a lover, the edge of the universe. The horizon is within me because I too am beyond the horizon. This undergirds both the anxiety and hope in Derrida's observation: "It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other."[^41] What Derrida sees as evident in the economy of identity definition, seems given by the very structure of being itself.[^42] And, following Derrida, this is both the tyranny and gift of the horizon: one can never tell whether it is an eternal dawn, or the eternal dusk. Drawing on Tillich and Marion, we can try to distinguish between the break of dawn, and dusk twilight.

The horizon is not an *idol* which is in essence the beyond brought-to-hand, robbed of its beyond-being by giving it "place." The demonic in Tillich and the idol in Marion bear this similarity when considered from the standpoint of the horizon of being—each is an attempt to reassert what is beyond-being, *with* being *back upon* being.[^43] It would be tempting to say that, simply, it is no longer "Being-toward." But in the Heideggerian sense this misses the mark, since for Heidegger Being-toward is delimited by Being-toward-the-end which in this case is the misconception necessary to *up*end: the end as *horizon* is not a closed end or a circumscription.[^44]

In the second half of *Being and Time*, Heidegger proceeds by doing exactly what I would prefer to avoid: take the horizon as the-end and bring-it-to-hand, to set ones gaze upon it as idol rather than to rest the gaze on the horizon for what it insinuates beyond itself.[^45] The demonic and the idol both attempt to *proximate* the horizon and reassert themselves as horizon which collapses its very horizon-ness. In this spatial sense, the demonic *does* have a serpentine form: the Ouroboros. It is the collapse of being upon itself that in perceiving a horizon as end becomes its own end. It is Lucifer frozen in stasis batting on endlessly for freedom destining his infernal stasis—*incurvatus in se*.

If one were to free it from its Heideggerian baggage, the best way to describe the individual in an open economy of being *is* "Being-toward-." The second hyphen is not a typo but necessary a representation of the horizon which readies-to-hand the beyond which cannot be brought-to-hand. The divine in Tillich and the icon in Marion share this similarity. The divine remains open to the process of being overcoming non-being. Here Marion is worth quoting at length,

The icon summons the gaze to surpass itself here in view of the invisible. The gaze can never rest or settle if it looks at an icon; it always must rebound upon the visible, in order to go back in it up the infinite stream of the invisible.[^46]

The horizon of being lies always everywhere as an icon of the beyond in this sense. It is what comes on to us on which our gaze can never rest or settle. For Gadamer, this is because the nature of the horizon is in its drawing one to advance toward it.[^47] If our gaze *does* 'rest' or settle, it is not on the horizon that it lies, because so long as our gaze is fixed on the horizon we are Be-*ing*-toward- it. Whatever our gaze can rest upon is an idol, which is not a horizon. The horizon of being performs precisely the function of the icon—it "makes visible only by giving rise to an infinite gaze." By the gaze resting upon the horizon as visible icon it gives rise to an infinite gaze by which we orient ourselves always toward what is beyond it.

This is the manner in which Tillich can assert that "infinity is a *directing* concept, not a constituting concept. It *directs* the mind to experience its own unlimited potentialities, but it does not establish the existence of an infinite being."[^48] The infinite and the finite are not ontological categories of being, but descriptions which reveal the situatedness of the individual within horizons. This unearths the tension of existence albeit with a slight pivot. "If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself," Tillich writes, "we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself."[^49] What Tillich frames ontologically, might be better framed strictly phenomenologically: namely, that to be situated within horizons is to see the horizons as the reason for one's finitude *and* the reasons for one's infinitude. Being does not insinuate infinitude in the same way which it insinuates finitude, but it does insinuate both because of the constant presence of the horizon to direct being (or *a* being) beyond its very being.

Nothing, particularly in spatial terms, could more accurately describe this function than a horizon. Which in this sense is more helpful because of the spatial concern present. The notion of "the gaze" is first and foremost a phenomenon of situatedness and spatiality. Space comes from the horizon. The horizon is unique then in the sense which it is *the* everyday phenomenon, a primal phenomenon which discloses the beyond as visible because its very function is to transport the gaze beyond itself as a phenomenon. The horizon-in-itself is a unique phenomena which never discloses itself-as-itself because it can do no such thing. It only discloses itself insofar as it conceals what is beyond itself and therefore spatializes us in relation to what is beyond. In addition, it continually discloses more of what is beyond insofar as one is oriented toward it. In doing so, it renders the eyes so "clear and keen" that one can endure gazing into the sun itself. Dante's stars then, are also our stars—they are horizons, icons of the invisible divine.

The horizons which surround us in everydayness *are* the same horizon on which Beatrice and Dante stand. This metaphysics spatializes a hermeneutics of love.[^50] To love is to move toward the horizon of the other, and vice versa, both horizons of which are the same horizon of being. As Marion writes, "the icon opens in a face, where man's sight envisages nothing, but goes back infinitely from the visible to the invisible by the grace of the visible itself."[^51] This grace is the gift *of gift* given as the horizon of being; the horizon which lays between God and the world, is the same horizon which lies between the self and the other.

## Divine aesthetics; Trinitarian horizons

The reorienting point of light Dante sees in Beatrice's eye makes him turn to face the empyrean. With this the *stelle* that ends each of Dante's comedies irrupts into its full threefold meaning: the star from which his *ubi*—his space—is given, is the same star that twinkles in his belovéd's eyes and the same stars toward which he gazes. It is the second and third meaning now toward which we turn our attention. It is difficult to speak of one without the other, precisely because the in and towards occur naturally as one and the same motion. Suffice to say, to be in an economy of being open to what is beyond it is to be oriented toward the horizon as it insinuates what is beyond. This relationship of being to the beyond, is iconized and brought to its full power by contemplation of the Trinity which has in and of itself indications of the very same structure.

So let me return to Gadamer, albeit somewhat on his head, with a question: is there a potential ontological implication of his observation that "to be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete."? Gadamer situates the individual historically, but admits a historical consciousness which is, precisely, *self*-conscious of the openness (i.e. *general* economy) of its own "existence."[^52] So an ontological paradox undergirds what Gadamer calls the "unified flow of experience" which is parallel to that "mystery of being beyond essence and existence" in Tillich. If the historical consciousness is self-conscious of its openness toward horizons, than a horizon exists when one gazes, so to speak, at the consciousness of the individual. Every individual stands *in* a horizon, by the nature of their openness from and toward horizons.

Gadamer writes, "Every experience has implicit horizons of before and after, and finally fuses with the continuum of the experience present in the before and after to form a unified flow of experience."[^53] But to reorient our thinking toward *spatial* metaphors with regard to the horizon, I prefer to substitute, *from, in* and *towards,* for Gadamer's before, 'present' and after.[^54] The self defines its space not by looking down at its shadow, but by allowing its gaze to rest on the horizon. As it moves *from* a horizon, it moves *in* a horizon and *toward* a horizon. This is always the same horizon: the horizon of being beyond which we are drawn by, in Tillich's words, "unlimited potentialities."[^55]

It is precisely because of these horizons, that being is itself a *open* economy *not* a restricted economy. We stand like Dante on earth in heaven, and cry with the shades in Mercury when the lovers appear: "*Ecco chi crescerà li nostri amori*." As the Hollanders render it with beauty: "*Oh,* *here is the one who will increase our loves!*" Dante's heaven is an open economy *because* of the horizon of being. Our space *in* the divine life is *holy* usury: value is added and nothing is used up. And in this case, it is the primal value, the value and the giver of value in and of itself, rather than alchemical golden eggs. We are spatialized be-*ing* toward the beyond which does not deplete on the other side of the horizon.

This is how the lovers in Dante's heaven can be rendered in an open economy of gift which is "grounded" (in the Tillichian sense of theonomy) in the Empyrean. As Marion writes: "the icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth."[^56] The horizons that lies around us as horizons in being are too horizons *of* being which are *the* horizon of being. This gives a far deeper inclination to the platitude to 'expand ones horizons.' The horizons in life, in nature, in others, in art (as Gadamer indicates and to which we will return) spatialize us, draw us and orient us toward what is beyond. As Dante at the edge of highest sphere of heaven, sees the Empyrean first as a twinkling star in the eye of Beatrice (as he also had in his youth), Dante is summoned into the depth of Beatrice's gaze as he gazes toward the very horizon of being itself.

Dante finally reaches the summit of the highest peak of being, the final edge of all that *is* to meet God's very self: "Thus," he recalls, "all my mind, absorbed / was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent, / becoming more enraptured in its gazing" (*Pd.* 33.97-99). His eyes finally fall upon that which is beyond the horizon of being. It was "a single aspect— / for It is always what It was before—" (*Pd.* 33.110-111). That is the purity of 'being-itself'—being, non-being, and the unity of these in the Tillichian sense. And yet "even as I gazed / at the sole semblance and, as I change, / it too was being, in my eyes, transformed" (*Pd.* 33.112-114). How can it be, that finally in the beyond, his gaze is fixed so permanently and on a single point absorbed, and yet, in some sense, *literally* absorbed in the gazing such that it cannot be fixed because it "moves" itself?

If the Ouroboros is a symbol of the demonic in this sense, the divine symbol must only be that of the Trinity that Dante sees in "three circles / having three colors but the same extent, / and each one seemed reflected by the other [...] equally breathed forth by one and by the other" (*Pd*. 33.917). It is a *divine incurvatus in se* because of the very nature of its own openness from, in and toward itself. Whereas the Ouroboros is demonic in-ness, the Trinity's in-ness is defined by its from-ness and toward-ness. In this sense, the divine life *'is'* beyond itself. It *'is'* beyond-being *by the nature of its openness to itself*. To profit from Derrida usuriously, 'God is different from God-self,' or to intensify Tillich's turn of phrase—God is literally a "God above God"[^57]

In this way, being as it has been rendered here must proceed by the divine life *from* the same motion*, in* the same motion and *toward* the same motion by which 'the Son' is begotten from 'the Father' and thus proceeds the 'Spirit.'[^58] In parallel logic, Marion can depict the Trinity as "a logic of manifestation" by drawing on St. Augustine's use of the icon in *De Trinitate*:

> The invisible communion of Father and Son is thus extended in a communion (fully immanent to itself) between the invisible (where of course the Son dwells with the Father) and the visible (where the Son appears in flesh and blood, in this very way including the Father with him): the visible becomes, in the body of Christ made visible, the only place of manifestation for the entire Trinity, without the passage from the invisible to the visible inflicting upon him the least bit of extraterritoriality, exteriority or alienation. The divide, or rather, the span of all phenomenality, namely the transition from the visible to the invisible, is thus taken up and comprised precisely *inside* the Trinity, and in no way constrained to be exteriorized (after all, in what place could God ever go other than within himself?) in order to be phenomenalized, but recapitulating in itself the space and the opening of the visibility of the invisible itself (thus, refuting, in advance, yet definitively, Hegel's speculative interpretation).[^59]

As the Logos brings the beyond into being (as the divine *Word*), so does being proceed from, in, and toward beyond. Being, in this way, can be called an event of the divine life.[^60] This is simply the postmodern rendering of the Rahnerian axiom.[^61] Being is qualified 'event' only in the sense that one can imagine it as circumscribed by the Trinity and can therefore be *named* as 'event;' for us, being is event in the sense that it insinuates "something [is not] present, but something seeking to make itself felt in what is present."[^62]

Being *as* event strikes at a metaphysics which accounts for two primary aspects of the 'event' in postmodern discourse. On one hand, following Vattimo, it preserves the "weakness of Being," in the Heideggarian sense that Being is not a "stable, necessary, and objectively knowable foundation."[^63] On the other hand, that the event of being is an event of the divine life (open in the way it has been described) means that being *does* possess a concrete knowable foundation, but it is not "known" through over-determinant "knowing" (stable, necessary, objectively) but it is known through be*-ing* as being-itself implicates its openness to the beyond (i.e. the unconditional, the impossible).[^64] This is why on one hand the event *qua* event solicits us, invites us, provokes us, and calls us from beyond the horizon; but also why, as Badiou gestures towards this paradox "if there exists an event, *its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation of itself*."[^65] That we are at the site of the event of being is what conceals the nature of the event itself from us.[^66] If 'God' is 'one of our names for the unconditional, for the *event* of the impossible,' it is because being is the first impossible made possible from which we cannot discern the event on account of our standpoint in the situation itself.[^67] It echoes the call of the divine life as a result of the very nature of being-itself as open and given unto its own horizons that qualifies being as 'event.'[^68]

This is a potential trajectory which Trinitarian thought can take beginning with the words of the Apostle that if "we are children of God [then] heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:17 *NASB*). As "the Son" is born, so are "we born"—so is *being* born from beyond it, given to it and oriented toward it, all "abiding in [itself] alone" (*Pd.* 33.124). Consider the import of Barths' reflection on the above verse: "Quite apart from any conceivable change in us, we are constituted by eternity and qualified by what is to us invisible."[^69] Despite the kerygmatic divergence with Tillich, the phenomenological import is in fact quite similar: whether God has irrupted into space time, or is located in the ground of our being, our phenomenological experience is constituted by its orientation toward the horizon of being. Not only insofar as we are propelled to be beyond ourselves, but because we are also constituted by our very self which lays beyond the horizon. Being, and I as being, share with the divine life as being-itself in the open economy of existence.

A parallel question can be framed thusly: is the Trinity an icon of being, or is being an icon of the Trinity? Let us consider it from both sides. The Trinity is the icon that gives icon-ness as that which can only ever refer to that which is beyond itself. From beyond-being it is the icon of icons— the ontological basis for the iconic phenomena. The Trinity is the ontological ground ('being'-itself) from which, in which, and toward which the open economy of being is given. This is what Marion observes as the phenomenal significance of the Trinity:

> In a word, the Trinity offers not only the content of the uncovering, but also its mode of manifestation. Or better: the mode of manifestation (the phenomenal *wie*) coincides exactly with that which manifests itself (*the Sich-selbst-zeigende*).[^70]

It is what the gaze of Dante can rest on with motion. "Being," Tillich writes, "comprises becoming and rest, becoming as an implication of dynamics and rest as an implication of form." In this way the individual occupies an *open* space. A space which is defined *by* situatedness within an open economy. I, like Eve, "lay" beyond the horizon, but find myself there too, "a Shape within the watry gleam" (329, 4.461). And by moving toward the horizon, I move also always toward my-self.

To use a literal icon to depict the Trinity *qua* the divine icon, we turn towards Andrei Rublev's *magnum opus.* The 15th century work draws on the story of the angels of Mamre and the hospitality of Abraham (Gen. 18) to depict in the three *hypostases* in Bonaventurian *circumcessio*. It is a challenge of the highest order to let ones eyes rest statically somewhere on the icon. And yet, let us set aside the persons depicted and consider only their gaze. The viewers eyes are drawn immediately to the eyes of the persons, all three of whom direct their gaze towards the others. The two on the right (presumably representing the Son and Spirit) gaze directly toward the leftmost angel (presumably the Father). The Son's gaze falls directly into the eyes of the Father, whose gaze gestures outward somewhere it seems *beyond* the Son the Spirit while being at the same time captivated between them. The depiction leaves the viewer's gaze in constant motion, attempting to land the Father's gaze on one or the other. The Spirit's gaze also rests on the Father, but—unlike the Son—since his head is postured in genuflection, his eyes fall somewhere below the gaze of the Father.

The result for the viewer is a gaze which rests in its movement. To gaze into one of the persons eyes is to be drawn toward the horizon the particular hypostasis, only to discover his gaze rests upon and is drawn toward the horizon of another, and so on. The viewer is drawn into the restless-restedness of the Trinity in open *circumcessio*. The gaze of each person rests upon the horizon of the other and is drawn toward it. As a result the viewer looks and is immediately drawn from one gaze towards another resting in a divine aesthetic of motion. The depiction of the iconic nature of the Trinitarian gaze thus multiplies the power of Rublev's icon by the very nature of its reflexivity. It reveals the potency of the icon as art by depicting the nature of divinity as iconic. Furthermore, it envelops the gaze of the viewer who becomes then too an icon of the divinity by the very nature of their gaze which now rests upon the Trinity, in motion among the persons in the icon.

As far as this investigation is concerned the result is—from this side of being it—*the icons* *of icons*. It is the icon which gestures toward the very iconic nature of the divine life itself, and in turn spatializes the viewer in the same dynamic openness of the Trinitarian gaze which it seeks to represent. It is as though the fourth spot at the table is opened toward us, standing with Abraham 'near them by a tree;' Abraham, who in open hospitality welcomed the three strangers (Gen. 8:1-8), is invited into the inner deliberative life of the persons themselves (Gen. 8:16-33).

This is the deeper insinuation of the Augustinian doxology "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." It is precisely restful *because* the restlessness of being can rest in the primal rested-in-motion by the nature of the orientation toward the other and so beyond the self. Opposed to the Ouroboros and Dante's Lucifer which attempt to rest by idolizing the primally restless being (the self) and therefore achieve stasis. The same can be said then of the horizon of being as it carries our gaze into the divine life—just like Dante, our eyes cannot rest until they rest on that which takes us (in Marion's words) "from the visible to the invisible by the grace of the visible itself." Just as a 'doxology' is rendered in the liturgy as an orienting praise from, in, and toward which the parishioners leaves a service, so does this doxology spatialize us in the divine life: it is the horizon of being from which, in which and toward which we discover our space.

[^1]: Paul Tillich, *Systematic Theology* (University of Chicago Press, 1951)., 255.

[^2]: See Jean-Luc Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte* (University of Chicago Press, 2012)., 228-233, esp. 232f. Marion argues that Thomas was, in fact, trying to *exclude* God from being in large part, because "the *esse* that Thomas Aquinas recognizes for God does not open any metaphysical horizon, does not belong to any onto-theology, and remains such a distant analogy with what we once conceived through the concept of being, that God proves not to take any part in it, or to belong to it, or even—as paradoxical as it may seem—to be." Whether or not one agrees with Marion's interpretation of Thomas, it is clear that this interpretation is correlates directly with Tillich's assertion that "God does not exist."

[^3]: Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004)., 301.

[^4]: John Milton, *The Complete Poetry of John Milton* (Anchor, 1971)., 328.

[^5]: Gadamer, *Truth and Method*., 238: "A horizon is not a rigid boundary but something that moves with one and invites one to advance further."

[^6]: See Gadamer, *Truth and Method*., 86, 120.

[^7]: Gadamer, *Truth and Method*., 112; cf. Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 193: "Time is the central category of finitude."

[^8]: See Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 12-14 for discussion of the "ultimate concern" and the criteria for theolgoy.

[^9]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 205.

[^10]: See Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 6-8 for discussion of the "situation."

[^11]: Milton, *The Complete Poetry of John Milton*., 328f, 410f. The awakening of Milton's Adam and Eve in the garden bears strong resemblance to the existential concerns of late-Modern thought. There is a considerable argument to be made that Milton offers poetically an early-Modern precursor to 20th century phenomenology in *Paradise Lost*. Adam and Eve's first-person recollection of their "creation" (8.252-295, 4.440-491, respectively) and their initial attempts to understand being are through an investigation of phenomena. By opening Adam and Eve's creation with a sudden consciousness of the self and the world, Milton engages in a discourse of what it means "to be" which contours with Heidegger's later philosophical concerns. Milton's choice to depict Adam and Eve as primitive adults awakening from sleep into a consciousness is commensurate with the existential outlook of Heidegger's phenomenology. For one orienting parallel consider Martin Heidegger, *Being and Time* (Harper and Row Publishers, 1962)., 76, when Heidegger claims that "the life of primitive peoples" might be a good place to begin because "primitive phenomena are often less concealed." Is this not Milton's precise methodology for "justifying the ways of God to man?" (1.26). This type of conceptual genealogy is somewhat unexplored territory except in tangent to trends in "historical phenomenology." For the most related work done in recent years see Timothy Harrison, “Adamic Awakening and the Feeling of Being Alive in Paradise Lost,” *Milton Studies* 54, no. 1 (2013). and his dissertation Timothy Harrison, “Forms of Sentience in Early Modernity,” diss., University of Toronto, 2014)..

[^12]: See Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 211ff.

[^13]: Boethius, *The Consolation of Philosophy,* trans. David R. Slavitt (Harvard University Press, 2008)., 5.

[^14]: See Edgar Allan Poe, *Complete Tales and Poems* (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2009)., 251-255. In Poe's *The Masque of the Red Death,* Prince Prospero and his courtiers withdraw to indulgent seclusion in his abbey to escape the threat of 'the Red Death,' which is portrayed as a devastating plague but eventually enters as a spectral figure. The Prince cannot succeed in ousting the figure and the Red Death kills each reveler despite their seclusion.

[^15]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 194.

[^16]: John D. Caputo, *The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional* (Polebridge Press, 2015)., 2: Because "If we want to change theology—or anything else—change the metaphors."

[^17]: See Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 110.

[^18]: Cf. Alain Badiou, *Being and Event* (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006)., 56; Badiou opts for 'void,' in a parallel sense: "The void is the name of being—of inconsistency—according to a situation, inasmuch as presentation gives us therein an unpresentable access, thus non-access, to this access, in the mode of what is not-one, nor composable of ones; thus what is qualifiable within the situation solely as the errancy of the nothing. It is essential to remember that no term within a situation designates the void, and that in this sense Aristotle quite rightly declares in the Physics that the void is not; if one understands by ‘being’ what can be located within a situation, that is, a term, or what Aristotle called a substance. Under the normal regime of presentation it is veridical that one cannot say of the void, non-one and unsubstantial, that it is."

[^19]: Cf. Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 110.

[^20]: Gadamer, *Truth and Method*.: 301-303: "Since Nietzsche and Husserl, the word [horizon] has been used in philosophy to characterize the way in which thought it tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one's range of vision is gradually expanded. [...] The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving." Cf. Badiou, *Being and Event*., 58: "Ontology, therefore, can only count the void as existent. This statement announces that ontology deploys the ruled order—the consistency—of what is nothing other than the suture-to-being of any situation, the *that which* presents itself, insofar as inconsistency assigns it to solely being the unpresentable of any presentative consistency." Although Badiou seeks to recast being in similarly open-ended relationship with 'non-being' (or the void) he does not avoid over-determining the void in its relationship with being, rather than vice versa.

[^21]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 110.

[^22]: Jean-Luc Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte* (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 88–93.

[^23]: Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, *Givenness and Revelation* (Oxford University Press, 2018).: 70: "Nothing less is necessary than leaving the essentially *finite* horizon of Being and beings, the nullity of which we saw in the first letter to the Corinthians, and which could not harbor the unseen of God, much less disclose it and uncover it—in order to enter into, or rather to allow oneself to be submerged by the unlimited horizon of charity, by definition hyperbolic and excessive;" also Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 234-236.

[^24]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 189.

[^25]: This quote exists primarily because of its recirculation in funeral homes and its origin is obscure. It is commonly attributed to author Rossiter W. Raymond (1840-1918) because of a poem which included the words. It was later put to song by Carly Simon on *Have You Seen Me Lately?* (1990). However, the quote is probably attributable to a bereavement prayer by William Penn: "We give back to you, O God, those whom you gave to us. You did not lose them when you gave them to us and we do not lose them by their return to you. Your dear Son has taught us that life is eternal and love cannot die, so *death is only a horizon and a* *horizon is only the limit of our sight*. Open our eyes to see more clearly and draw us closer to you that we may know that we are nearer to our loved ones, who are with you. You have told us that you are preparing a place for us; prepare us also for that happy place, that where you are we may also be always, O dear Lord of life and death." (Qtd. in Dorothy M. Stewart, *The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers* (Westminster John Knox Press, 1999)., 14)

[^26]: Cf. Jacques Derrida, *The Gift of Death* (University Of Chicago Press, 1996)., 40: "The approach or apprehension of death signifies the experience of anticipation while indissociably referring to the meaning of death that is suggested in this apprehensive approach. It is always a matter of seeing coming what one can't see coming, of giving oneself that which one can probably never give oneself in a pure and simple way. Each time the self anticipates death by giving to it or conferring upon it a different value, giving itself or reappropriating what in fact it cannot simply appropriate."

[^27]: Derrida, *The Gift of Death*., 47.

[^28]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 189.

[^29]: Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 87-88: Marion echoes this sentiment as it is revealed by God's "indifference to ontic difference."

[^30]: In this case, it can be inferred from the fact that what is beyond the horizon would continually reveal itself to the sailor, that the person is traversing a spherical surface.

[^31]: See Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 69: "Being does not come to the being from itself, nor does it arise from Being, but from God's gift—even and above all if the being does *not know* God's gift;" cf. Derrida, *The Gift of Death*. 71f: "[...] by commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, to put his son to death by offering a gift of death to God, by means of this double gift wherein the gift of death consists in putting to death by raising one's knife over someone and of putting death forward by giving it as an offering, God leaves him free to refuse—and that is the test."

[^32]: Vita Nuova, XIX

[^33]: Dante Alighieri, *Paradiso,* trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2007)., 747 n. 67-72.

[^34]: See Alighieri, *Paradiso*., 617 n. 142-143

[^35]: Boethius, *The Consolation of Philosophy*., 5.

[^36]: Heidegger, *Being and Time*., 152.

[^37]: Heidegger, *Being and Time*., 142.

[^38]: Heidegger, *Being and Time*., 142.

[^39]: John D. Caputo, *Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida* (Fordham University Press, 1996)., 18-19: Derrida: "[...] a gift is something that is beyond the circle of reappropriation, beyond the circle of gratitude. [...] If the gift is given, then it should not even appear to the one who gives it or to the one who receives it, not appear as such."

[^40]: Caputo, *Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida*., 144-145: "The gift is impossible; indeed, 'the gift is another name for the impossible.' That is why we love it so much, like mad. It is the one thing that is above all *desirable*. What we truly 'desire' above all, wildly, *in a desire beyond desire*, *is this impossible thing that can never be experienced, never be met with in the sphere of phenomenal* *presence*. It is what can never present itself that we desire most: 'one can think, desire, and say only the impossible according to the measure without measure of the impossible.' For all the garden-variety possibilities, all the determinate presences, all the determinate objects of knowledge and volition, *all the* *'possibles' that remain within the horizon of the foreseeable* and the same, do not profoundly solicit us. They do not draw us out of ourselves, do not shake the circle of the same, do not call up the coming of the other, the invention, the in-coming of the *tout autre*, which is what we most desire."

[^41]: Caputo, *Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida*., 13-14.

[^42]: Caputo, *Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida*., 13: "Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, [but] is open to another identity."

[^43]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 13: Tillich makes this point which Marion would agree very much with: "Idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy," particularly with regard to Marion's discussion of conceptual idolatry in Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 29-37; see also Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 216ff: "[...] holy objects are not holy in and of themselves, They are holy only by negating themselves in pointing to the divine of which they are mediums. If they establish themselves as holy, they become demonic." In this Tillich's use of the "medium" is a primarily ontological rendering of what Marion prefers to describe phenomenologically as the idol's "transparency"—or rather, lack thereof—as a result of the failure of the *gaze*: "To stop the gaze: we could not do better than to say, to stop a gaze, allow it to rest (itself) in/on an idol, when it can no longer pass beyond. In this stop, the gaze ceases to overshoot and transpierce itself, hence it ceases to transpierce visible things, in order to pause in the splendor of one of them" (Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 11f).

[^44]: Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 38: "It does not suffice to go beyond an idol in order to withdraw oneself from idolatry. Such a reduplication of idolatry, which even Nietzsche cannot avoid, we can suspect in Heidegger in a way even more vast and hence more dangerous than in Nietzschean expectation."

[^45]: See Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 38ff; Marion makes the same case for Enframing (*Gestell*) as a form of, what he calls, 'double idolatry.'

[^46]: Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 18.

[^47]: See Gadamer, *Truth and Method*., 238

[^48]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 190.

[^49]: Paul Tillich, *The Courage to be* (Yale University Press, 1974)., 180. Since Tillich has, in so many places, delimited God not as being, but as being-itself (See Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 234-241) it is unclear whether he also means to ascribe finitude and anxiety to being-itself, or merely to the condition of the being specifically.

[^50]: John D Caputo, *On Religion* (Routledge, 2018)., 133-137

[^51]: Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 19.

[^52]: Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 302.

[^53]: Gadamer, *Truth and Method*., 237.

[^54]: I will later return to Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons.'

[^55]: Tillich, *Systematic Theology*., 190.

[^56]: Marion, *God Without Being: Hors-Texte*., 19.

[^57]: Caputo, *Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida*., 13; Tillich, *The Courage* *to be*., 186-189; that is, rather than simply "the God above the theistic God."

[^58]: Cf. Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 88: "[...] thus again, the final prayer before the arrest, in which Christ asks in front of his disciples to receive even (and above all) at this nadir the glory of his eternal zenith; 'Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you' (Jn. 17:1); and 'Glorify me now with the glory which I had with you before the world was made' (Jn. 17:5). For he is asking that the intra-trinitarian glory manifest itself to men in the world, that it show itself everywhere where it is given [...] Such a manifestation *ad extra* of the Trinity to men (even the non-believing) does not imply any fading of the *mystērion* into some sort of negativity of spirit or worldly profanation; on the contrary, far from the Trinity being dissolved in exteriority, this manifestion provokes the 'crowd,' and especially the disciples, to believe that which shows itself as it gives itself, and therefore to *enter into* the Trinity."

[^59]: Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 111.

[^60]: See John D Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, *After the Death of God* (Columbia University Press, 2007)., 47-48.

[^61]: Karl Rahner, *The Trinity* (Seabury Press, 1970)., 22-23: "The 'economic' Trinity is the 'immanent' Trinity and the 'immanent' Trinity is the 'economic' Trinity;" cf. Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 98.

[^62]: Caputo and Vattimo, *After the Death of God*., 47-48.

[^63]: Gianni Vattimo, *After Christianity* (Columbia University Press, 2002)., 23; see Marion, *Givenness and* *Revelation*., 100 *contra* Vattimo, *After Christianity*., 25-39. Marion is correct in his criticism of those like Schelling and Vattimo who echoe early teachings of Joachim of Fiore and Gregory of Nazianzus: "Taken literally, the narrowly historical temporalization of the Trinity flattens the economy into chronology, rather than sanctioning history as revelatory in a trinitarian manner."

[^64]: Caputo, *The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional*., 94: "In theopoetics, we are not trying to propose propositions that represent a state of affairs, but to let the event happen and to let it happen to us;" cf. Michael Polanyi, *Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy* (University Of Chicago Press, 1974)., 327: "Our comprehension of a living individual entails a subsidiary awareness of its parts which is not wholly specifiable in more detached terms. This understanding acknowledges a particular comprehensive—i.e. 'molar'—achievement of the individual itself. Since our knowledge of this molar function is not specifiable in 'molecular' terms, the function itself is not reducible to molecular particulars; it must be acknowledged therefore as a higher form of being, not determined by these particulars. We can reach this conclusion directly by recalling that the understanding of a whole appreciates the coherence of its subject matter and thus acknowledges the existence of a value that is absent from the constituent particulars."

[^65]: Badiou, *Being and Event*., 181, (*emphasis original*).

[^66]: Cf. Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 99: "[...] Revelation does not belong to history [...] but is registered in, or rather *through* events, that is, saturated phenomena, which are un-objectifiable by concepts, and the coming of which (unexpected arrival, *arrivage*) therefore imposes an unlimited hermeneutics on their witness."

[^67]: Caputo, *The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional*., 49.

[^68]: See Caputo and Vattimo, *After the Death of God*., 54-55.

[^69]: Karl Barth, *The Epistle to the Romans* (Oxford University Press, 1968)., 300.

[^70]: Marion, *Givenness and Revelation*., 99.