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

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.