Miscellanies: Doxology of Space
[Misc. 1] God shines through
creatures, by them, they are good
because they express God’s goodness, and this
is why God declares them good in Genesis (there being no other standard than
God’s own self by which to compare)[1];
in themselves, by themselves they do not shine but are
dark, “Created things are darkness in so far as they proceed from nothing.”
(Thomas Aquinas, Quaestio disputata de
veritate Q.18, a.2, ad.5).
[Misc. 2] God comes to us clothed in spaces, garbed in times. The Bible encourages a “surprising spatial
piety;”[2]
the heavens declare his glory (Ps. 19),[3]
the unseen things of God have nevertheless been seen in the creatures (Rom. 1:20), and indeed the quintessential moment
of God’s presence to us is Christ incarnate, embodied in the warp and woof of
the world’s architecture. God does not
come to us “naked,” as Luther was fond of saying, “we do not discuss a vagabond
naked God, but one who is clothed, with definite signs in place.”[4]
All spaces are, of course, not equal, declaring God in different ways and in
different intensities as they relate to Christ, yet “the God who is shows his glory not as the nimbus of
otherness that dwells like a phantom glamour about all finite things…[rather]
all that is finitely apprehended (which is to say aesthetically as a continuous
series of objects appearing...) fills the distance as light, approach,
proximity, and peace, because God gives his beauty as expression…”[5] Or
put otherwise, “All things that are dwell in the glory of God, and yet the
glory of God becomes visible as a beauty among the world’s beauties.”[6]
Space and time reveal their sacred depth insofar as they are promises of a
Presence which reach beyond
themselves to God; they have, so to speak, depth as the promise of depth, a promise they (and we) cannot make but receive. Jean-Yves Lacoste puts it well: “the
comprehensive experience of an object, in fact, has only the possibility of an infinite experience,” which means “no human eschatology of perception,” is
conceivable.[7] And yet God is not received “objectively,”
through spaces and bodies which reveal Him, for God is not an object, rather as the poet Wallace Steven’s wonderfully puts
it “we live in the description of a place, not the place itself.”[8] And Graham Ward says much the same thing, that
“we only ever deal with body images, and so the body as a metaphor or the body
as an analogy is only a specific rhetorical employment of the imagined body.”[9]
Thus man’s reception of God’s
self-interpretation is itself interpretive, poetic, doxological. This is thus to say each created thing has depth as the object and space is read as a promise of salvation; each
thing is only as an oblique,
proleptic enactment of the peace,
communion, and justice of resurrection.
[Misc.3] In an environment where transcendence is sought through a
pure logic of immanence, the spatial piety of capitalism finds sacred spaces
which are at best counterintuitive to Christianity, and at worst, completely
idolatrous and destructive. It is not,
of course, that transcendence is actually
absent (even the most simple vacation to Disneyworld incarnates a human desire
for community and a more compassionate world, etc…) but it is being misread, misplaced, and so mispracticed,
with harmful results. If things are insofar as they are given by God,
then “to collect being is to hemorrhage all form…[to] lose all objects, indeed
materiality itself dissolves in the endless pursuit of the more.”[10] Hence
“In an effort to locate God, and overcome our fear of time, we collect
stuff at the mall or on some other quest.
But eventually we get bored…and throw it out or destroy it.” If this just happened with commodities it
would be bad enough, but “we grow bored and discard artwork…discard
places…discard people, marriages, traditions.”
Individuals are thus magnified as to lose all shape, and all other
“things,” thus also disappear as they are used and found ultimately lacking,
thin, nothing-in-themselves. Thus “in
the world of late modernity…[we] have come to accept a deep (if dim) sense of
absence as ‘normal.’”[11] We are, to steal Augustine’s famous phrase,
“in love with love…[we are] searching for an object for [our] love.”
[Misc. 4] Often misdiagnosed amongst Christians as merely the rise
of a rampant selfishness, and so “dealt with” by merely addressing our
subjective, existential orientations to money, we must rather be aware “Egoism
and the mere search for pleasure (whatever…these amount to) play a larger or
smaller role in…different individuals, but a large-scale shift in the general
understanding of the good requires some new understanding
of the good…the ideal itself becomes a crucial facilitating factor.”[12] Thus the person as the vanishing point of
will and desire is mirrored in society itself, and vice-versa, and thus its
space and time, are mutually reinforcing vanishing points. What happens in Vegas, so to speak, does not stay in Vegas; Vegas as a location
is in fact but a spatial metonym for wider cultural forces which Vegas
compresses, making us inattentive to the more pervasive and invisibly dispersed
forms of consumption driving it.
[Misc.5] This is what Catherine Pickstock calls the world’s
“spatialization,”[13]
or what Conor Cunningham calls the “lateralization of space,”[14]
by which they mean that places, objects, and bodies are no long related to
“vertical,” transcendent purpose, but the “purely spatial” and immanent
“horizontal,” field of space is merely an aggregate of individual things
definable now only by geometrical-mathematical description (i.e. chemical,
biological, physical, etc…). Existence
is no longer seen as a semeiotic field of values related to God and uncovered through
spiritual growth (bread is, for example, not more itself when given to feed the hungry). Rather since all things are individual, and
expressions of arbitrary power, the world begins to appear as the site of vast
uncertainty and conflicting powers (and God could, with his potentia absoluta or absolute power,
re-create the world or fundamentally alter any given part of it at any
moment). Every existent at any given
moment merely represents not an essence, but a logical possibility, which could
at any moment be otherwise than it is currently, and replaced by another
logical possibility. The nominalist
exaltation of the possible over the actual thus inscribed within society a
proto-capitalist logic, while voluntarism gave coding to a proto-capitalist
spontaneously acquisitive subject.
[1]
Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologia I q.32 ad.3
[2]
John Pahl, Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces:
Putting God in Place (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003) p.32.
[3]
C.f. Jenson ST 2:153ff.
[5]
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics
of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Co, 2003). p.236.
[7]
Jean-Yves Lacoste,
“Perception, Transcendence, and the Experience of God,” in Transcendence and Phenomenology ed. Peter M. Chandler Jr. and Conor
Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2007) p.3
[8]
Pahl, Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces
p.31.
[9]
Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial
Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009) p.228.
[10]
Conor Cunningham,
“Suspending the Natural Attitude: Transcendence and Immanence from Thomas
Aquinas to Michel Henry,” in Transcendence
and Phenomenology p.262.
[11]
Pahl, Malls and Other Sacred Spaces p.44-45.
[12]
Taylor, A
Secular Age p.474.
[13]
Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical
Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997) pp.47-101.
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