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