The Gravity of Mystical Ascent

The Gravity of the Situation

Let our initial step go back beyond even the Romans. If we first understand the basis of premodern views about gravity, we understand better why the contemplative, mystical views that seem to defy gravity had such potency, at least in the imagination if not in the mainstream of religious practice. For what keeps us to the ground in the ancient mind, at least since Socrates, is not anything external, such as a force caused by another object, a feature within space or time, or a particle, but something internal to our very nature—internal to all things of nature as an inherent property of their very essence. Aristotle’s thought here was foundational. At the beginning of Book II of his Physics, he states very clearly that everything that exists by nature “has within itself a beginning of movement and rest” and that if it is to move or stay at rest it is “not incidentally” (what the Latinists would later describe as per accidens) but by virtue of itself. This internal power Aristotle calls the ability to be the source of one’s own making or moving or generating (using the word poesis here for self-production—Aristotle, 1957, pp. 106, 108; 1961, 192b, p. 23). The movement toward one’s proper “place”—here the topos of our being, or that to which our very essence is oriented—is understood in a teleological sense: all matter has an intrinsic nature to gravitate toward the earth’s center, as part of its telos, just as the element of fire has an intrinsic nature to rise into the air. Thus, gravitas, for Aristotle, as telos, was not something we could cultivate, like the virtue it later became for Cato and the Romans. Rather, it was part of our constitutive being, our primary being, operating not just on the level of nature or phusis but also on the level of our soul or psuche: Aristotle works this out especially in On the Soul (De Anima) as entelechy, and in his Metaphysics, as operating on the level of metaphusis, in moving from potentiality to actuality and with the mind’s power to act. If we are to rise above our inherent gravitas, we must do this with the whole unity of our being, which means not abandoning our intrinsic nature but embracing its overall internal purpose, which unifies us, in the end, with Primary Being, the divine as First Principle.

Now, this ancient view held court throughout all of the West’s premodern development, with some theological and scientific adjustments along the way. We do not ascend above our station in life because it is not in our nature to ascend. Or we ascend only by finding within us that part of our nature that bears itself toward the gravitas of the Divine. As Aquinas (1999) said in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, “Hence, it is clear that nature is nothing but a certain kind of art, i.e., the divine art, impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end” (p. 134). It is only in early modernity, starting with Galileo, but then spectacularly with Isaac Newton, that we get any sense of gravity as something external to us. The image of a falling apple is more than just an image of a felicitous accident (one that leads to the theory of universal gravitation); it is the per accidens of something extrinsically concomitant, a counterimage to the theological sense of natural being per se with its divinely installed proclivities. When in the Genesis story of the Fall, the fruit descends from its bough, it is plucked by the hand of desire, or theologically, by the egoistical nature of sin, altering humankind’s natural bent permanently thereafter. The extrinsic force of modern gravity, on the other hand, wakes up Newton, and indeed all of modernity, to a different sense of what it means to have one’s feet on the ground, to tread the soils east of Eden, a sense that places Homo erectus above the rest of Nature no longer by virtue of a divine pedigree—created per se in the image of God—but now with nature concomitant to humanity, something that steps alongside humanity. Gravity becomes an external attribute, the topos of our being no longer something inherent within but, as Arendt perceived, determined by forces beyond our intrinsic human stance. This allows for a new disposition toward the world around us. We shift from a centripetal teleology, as the movement to our proper place at a pregiven center, to a centrifugal scientism, where the supreme human task is now to husband, through an expansion of empirical knowledge, the external forces of nature for humankind’s own instrumental ends. Newton’s theory of gravitational force is as much a revolution as Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism.

This shift invokes a fundamental split between Anthropos and Nature, one already captured a few generations before Newton by his compatriot Francis Bacon, who in the opening aphorisms of The New Organon (Novum Organum, 1620), whose very title signals an attempt to rewrite the logic (organum) of Aristotle, states, “All man can do to achieve results is to bring natural bodies together and take them apart; Nature does the rest internally” (Bacon, 1889, p. 192; 2000, p. 33). The rest here is a rewriting of the “whole,” which no longer acts solely in a prescribed and self-contained manner; the bringing together and taking apart is a rewriting of the poesis of human activity and its telos, which, as Arendt saw it, would now become lost to instrumental labor and activity. Modern gravitation, as a force extrinsic to the human condition per se, ironically allows humans to elevate themselves as never before, literally and figuratively. As Bacon (2000) says of the old scientific dispensation, “It is like water; it ascends no higher than its starting point” (p. 9). Yet of the new dispensation, he says, “The task and purpose of the human Power is to generate and superinduce on a given body a new nature or new natures” (italics added; 1889, p. 343; 2000, p. 102).

For Bacon of The New Organon, what is left of Aquinas’ “divine art” is only the divine impression, the “true prints and signatures made on the creation” (Bacon, 1889, p. 205; 2000, p. 37). It was Blaise Pascal, several decades later, who attempted to come to terms with this repositioning of the human topos vis-à-vis the divine. When considering the new infinities opened up by this new Baconian worldview, humans are neither any further above nor any further below. We are midway, at a midpoint, Pascal says, between an infinitesimal nothingness, so small we cannot imagine it, and an overwhelming vastness, so large we cannot fathom it. Both extremes are incalculable and infinite—the former a “new abyss,” the latter an ever-expanding firmament in vacuo (Pascal, 1995, p. 67; n.d., p. 56). ⁵ Both spaces terrify Pascal (1995), for they are everywhere and nowhere at once, a paradox he attempts to describe by drawing directly upon the medieval image made famous by two mystical theologians/philosophers, Meister Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa: Its “centre is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere” (p. 66). This is an image both Eckhart and, later, Nicolas of Cusa naturally ascribe to God: “God is the intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Eckhart, 1986, p. 230); “for its circumference and centre is God, who is everywhere and nowhere” (Nicolas of Cusa, 1997, p. 161). ⁶ That Pascal should draw on mystical theology is not accidental, for his reference here comes under the heading “Transition from Knowledge of Man to Knowledge of God,” a transition that brings us into mystical contemplation by translating Bacon’s divine “signatures” and “impressions” directly back into unimaginable wonder: “In the end,” Pascal immediately adds, “it is the greatest perceivable sign of God’s overwhelming power that our imagination loses itself in this thought” (Pascal, 1995, p. 66; n.d., p. 56). The sign, the character, is now constituted by a loss.

Pascal is here calling us back to the most supreme elevation of the self, the mystical elevation, insofar as the mystical is predicated on the intrinsic unity of nature and self, insofar as it depends on a gravitas both human and divine, simultaneously. Thus, in reference to gravity’s weight later in the same pensée, Pascal (1995) equates it with spirituality, not with corporeality:

Almost all philosophers confuse the ideas of things, and speak spiritually of corporeal things and corporeally of spiritual ones. They boldly say that bodies are pulled downwards, that they tend towards their centres, that they flee their destruction, that they fear emptiness. They say bodies have inclinations, sympathies and antipathies, things which belong only to spiritual beings. (p. 72)

The paradox of such gravity, and the “reason human beings are so slow in understanding nature,” is precisely that “the body can be combined with the spirit” (Pascal, 1995, p. 72). What Pascal tells us, as an early modern going against the currents of his day, is that such a paradox is not an alien feature of our inherited modernity. This paradox returns, I will suggest at the end, by way of yet another kind of elevated gravitas: a science that cannot fathom its own depths, despite its most ascendant discoveries and accomplishments.

The Ascent Above

Human ascension, speculated or realized, has long been a significant feature in our cultural and theological imaginaries. The transcending of the human—humans transcending their earth-bound station, humans transcending their own humanity—has typically been seen in spatial terms, so that almost all cosmologies prior to Newton placed the human in a realm below the gods. ⁷ To seek beyond the human was to seek above the human. And, therefore, there has always been a sense of a journey to the divine: one must traverse places, but places with altitude, and the greater the altitude, the closer to the divine. Height is thus a standard metaphor in religious imagery and imagination: the mountain, the ziggurat, the spire, the cloud, the celestial heavens, and so on. To reach God, one must ascend, somewhere, somehow, above. This is all well known. But there has always been a tradition that, in relation to the divine, sees space and the below/above distinction as nothing more than a metaphorical contrivance, unavoidable though it may be. This approach, as Pascal drew on it (bearing in mind its variegations well beyond Christian versions), is “grounded” in the mystical, which is to say it reconceives our notion of ground or of being grounded by doing away with “conception” altogether. ⁸ For in this thinking and experience, God is truly profundus, so that the higher one attains toward God’s being, the deeper one goes (into a mystery), like Pascal’s “new abyss.” This is why we must begin by invoking a gravitas, for to move into the highest realms of the mystical divine requires an ever-expanding weightiness, whose center of gravity is everywhere, its outer limits nowhere. And with this paradox comes other necessary oxymoronic metaphors: the blinding light, the moment of eternity, the point of the infinite, and so on. The material and immaterial also join this paradoxical schema, as Pascal tells us, for the body is caught up in an ecstasy by which it moves beyond itself, outside of itself. Thus the grave nature of the mystical experience: death is enjoined with life, life with death. But these contradictions are possible because they occur within, as an inherent part of unified nature, not as an external force acting on us, with a formula ⁹ that conforms only to the rules of non-contradiction. To journey above is to journey within. And the deeper one goes within, the higher one transcends oneself, or the more one goes outside oneself.

We get this kind of paradoxical movement already in premedieval and para-Christian forms of mystical visions, whether in that of Gnosticism or Neoplatonism, the former by moving beyond the material, the latter by moving through the material. Plotinus (1992), for example, perhaps the best-known Neoplatonist, speaks of “the soul’s descent into the body” as a “voluntary plunge,” by which the soul journeys toward the eventual harmonization with or subsumption by the One (p. 415 [IV.8]). But perhaps the best representative of this movement in Christian terms is the 13th-century Bonaventure and his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, or The Journey of the Mind to God, written in 1259.

There are seven steps to Bonaventure’s journey, all leading upward—“steps in the ascent to God”, as he calls them (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 38, 39). The first, rife with the metaphor of elevation (and Platonic/Aristotelean terms), begins this way:

Since happiness is nothing else than the enjoyment of the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can enjoy happiness unless he rise above himself, not, indeed, by bodily ascent, but by an ascent of the heart. (pp. 38, 39)

Now we might conclude two things from this opening line: (1) that it shuns the material and (2) that this journey is self-activated. And we might be forgiven for assuming such essential Socratic, even Aristotelean, features. But Bonaventure quickly punctures both assumptions. For in the very next line, he says, “But we cannot rise above ourselves unless a superior power raise us” (Bonaventure, 1956, p. 39). This statement suggests that we must rely on some external source. But that idea too is punctured in the next paragraph: “By praying, we are given light to discern the steps of the soul’s ascent to God. For we are so created that the material universe itself is a ladder by which we may ascend to God” (pp. 38, 39). Here, we see the unity that underpinned Aristotle’s gravitas, the unity of the soul’s created being with nature. And this unity allows the ladder’s rungs to be made of seemingly opposing elements: “some are vestiges, others, images; some corporeal, others, spiritual; some temporal, others, everlasting; some things are outside us, and some within” (p. 39.) This union of opposites, contra the Gnostic schema, and in concert with Neoplatonism, calls us to engage with the material world around us: “In order to arrive at the consideration of the First Principle, which is the most spiritual being and eternal and above us, we must pass through vestiges which are corporeal and temporal and outside us” (pp. 38, 39). Here, the image of the ladder is again employed:

Now since it is necessary to ascend Jacob’s ladder before we can descend it, let us place our first step in the ascent at the bottom, setting the whole visible world before us as a mirror through which we may pass over to God the Supreme Creator. (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 44, 45)

So the physical world constitutes the first of what Bonaventure calls a triple way of seeing and takes up the first two steps of the ascent (vestiges of the universe and of the world, respectively). The second way is to move from the vestiges of phusis to our mind, which is the image of God. Here, our natural powers of thought and intellect come into play. And it was likely that it was this move of Bonaventure’s, marking the journey of the title (Mentis), that Pascal had in mind when he reflects in his own pensée: “All our dignity consists therefore of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill” (Pascal, 1995, p. 73). Yet, for Bonaventure, this ascension does not distance us from Nature; it goes through nature, as in the first step. The mind becomes a microcosm within the total macrocosm, through which we make discernments and judgements by means of a trinity of powers—natural, rational, and moral philosophy (natural philosophy including both physics and metaphysics). In this the third step, God’s image is similar to what we find later in Bacon—that is, an imprint on our natural powers. Bonaventure (1956) even speaks of an “eternal art” (pp. 66, 67) ¹⁰ —God’s productive mind from which all things stem—suggesting Bacon’s source for his “divine art.” But the crucial difference here is that the imprint is as much on the mind as it is on the natural world as creation. There is no Deist inclination. This is not a “new organum,” a new mode or method of rational thinking, but an ascent to the Prime Mode as an underlying principle.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth steps constitute the third way of seeing: looking to the First Principle and going beyond to the eternal, the Art which is above us. In the fourth step, Christ as Truth takes on a human form and in doing so becomes “a ladder restoring the first ladder that had been broken in Adam” in the Fall (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 72, 73). We now access this second ladder through grace, which includes the Scriptures, which reforms the faculties of the soul. On the fifth rung, we contemplate God’s Being itself, as the basis of our ontotheological foundation, while on the sixth rung we contemplate the Blessed Trinity as the Supreme Good, in which “consists the perfect illumination of our mind” (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 94, 95).

Now, all this might seem a good medieval Catholic journey, informed by the ruling Scholasticism of its time: we start with natural law and move through divine revelation to eternal law. At this point, we will have reached what Bonaventure (1956) calls “synderesis,” which he elsewhere describes as the highest power of reason and “the natural gravity of the soul towards the good” (pp. 41, 42). But this is not yet the pinnacle, the seventh step. In all the previous steps, the mind is ascending first through the material world and then within itself, not by way of vision but awareness. But in this last step, the visionary step, the mind must “transcend and pass over, not only this visible world, but even itself” (p. 97). And in doing so, the metaphor of height, of ascension, collapses. Here, the image of Christ returns, not just as the ladder, but as the crucified Christ, hanging on the Cross, having climbed the ladder to his own death. This image, we are told, “also was shown to the Blessed Francis, when, in a transport of contemplation on the mountain height . . . there appeared to him the six-winged Seraph fastened to a cross” (p. 99). ¹¹ The image of height is still utilized—and in fact, Bonaventure interrupts the story of Francis to tell us that this very mountain is where he pondered over the matter that became the Itinerarium—but it is counterposed by that of the cross, so that the elevated Seraph is fastened to a wooden implement stuck in the ground. This juxtaposition becomes the mystery hidden from all eternity, leading to further oxymorons, to new mysteries:

Shrouded in the superluminous darkness of a silence that teaches secretly in a most dark manner that is above all manifestation and resplendent above all splendor, and in which everything shines forth—a darkness which fills invisible intellects by an abundance above all plenitude with the splendors of invisible good things that are above all good. (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 98, 99)

Here, we go above the above, beyond the beyond, transcending ourselves and all things, as we “ascend to the superessential gleam of the divine darkness by an incommensurable and absolute transport of a pure mind” (Bonaventure, 1956, pp. 98, 99), but only after, Bonaventure (1956) quickly adds, we can say of ourselves “My soul chooses hanging, and my bones, death” (pp. 98, 99). So the ascent becomes a “hanging,” a suspension between above and below, which is both beyond above and beyond below, a “superluminous darkness.”

Beyond Above

Of course, Bonaventure’s journey is by no means unique. Its general itinerary features earlier in Pseudo-Dionysius’ theology of uplifting, or later in The Cloud of Unknowing, in Nicolas of Cusa (e.g., On the Summit of Contemplation), in the raptures of Teresa of Avila, and in the thought of St. John of the Cross (e.g., The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night), to name only some. Each of these speaks of a mystical ascending, but whose “apex” is beyond any sense of spatiality altogether—a yet “higher” place, we might say, alongside Taylor’s higher time we spoke of at the beginning. To ascend here requires a deep gravitas, which is why Bonaventure ends his seven steps on the grave tone of death: to die and enter into the silent darkness of the “new mystery” is to be uplifted into a place, a topos, beyond all orientation.

This topos, and its paradoxical nature, take us outside normal time and place; it is not a premodern preserve, and Pascal is not the last of its inheritors, by any means. Its disruption of logic and location allows transportation beyond the usual flow of a history of ideas. And so we can return to the 20th century in a leap that would otherwise seem disjunct if not for the place at which we alight: 6 years before the launch of Sputnik 1 with which we opened our discussion and Salvador Dalí’s visual reinterpretation of St. John of the Cross in his famous painting “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” (Figure 1):

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Christ of Saint John of the Cross (Salvador Dalí 1904-1989).

Painted in 1951, the suspension between above and below is here rendered for us perspectivally, as the cross is neither planted in earth nor raised into heaven but left hanging in darkness. We, the viewers, look down upon the Christ from a place that is neither the divine realm nor our earthly dwelling, as a mysterious source of light fuses with the starless blackness of the heavenly sky. ¹² Dalí’s vision is a remarkable reworking for us of a mystical gravitas depicted by Bonaventure and others. The weight of the cross is rendered immaterial, as gravity itself seems suspended, and yet all the more weighty for its mystical transport, and for the paradoxes by which the all-too-human Christ remains faceless and bloodless as he hangs and by which the resurrection is only a resurrection while still on the cross.

But the crucial point to see here is that Dalí’s vision also carries us beyond the gravity of modernity. For what we see when we cast our eyes upon the Christ of St. John of the Cross is a realism defied by our forced perspective: we are not in a place we should be; we are not in a place we can account for. We are above, from one angle, as we look upon the head of Christ; but we are not above from another angle, as we look parallel with the horizon, and with our fellow humans standing on the shore in what is the foreground from one perspective but the background from another. Much of Dalí’s work explores in similar fashion the confounding of perspective within our post-Einsteinian world. As Pascal struggled to situate himself amid the new infinities of his post-Baconian world and its post-Aristotelean rationalism, so we too struggle to situate ourselves amid the shifts and dislocation typical of our late modernity, as we try to account, with Arendt, for our place in a world where the splitting of “Human” and “Nature” has had such severe consequences and where we no longer know where gravitas lies.

If Arendt in the middle of the 20th century saw the launch of the first object into space as a fundamental, irrevocable shift in the way we understand, philosophically and politically, ourselves and our world, another 20th-century figure, the French thinker Maurice Blanchot—a writer often associated, however qualified, with a new kind of mysticism—wrote a short piece in the early 1960s reflecting on the first man in space, the Russian Yuri Gagarin. Entitled The Conquest of Space, it begins,

Man does not want to leave his place. He says that technology is dangerous, that it threatens relations to the world, that true civilizations are fixed, and that the nomad acquires nothing. This is the man who felt a shock the day Gagarin became a spaceman. (Blanchot, 2010, p. 70)

Most, of course, expressed wonder and delight at this progress: the ultimate defiance and eluding of gravity. But for Blanchot, the true meaning of the experience was this: “Man broke with place” (2010, p. 70). We set ourselves beyond our known boundaries; we went beyond what fixes us. This is what must be considered decisive, Blanchot (2010) says:

Out there, in an abstract out there of pure sciences, subtracted from our common condition symbolized by gravity, there was someone, not even in the sky, but in space, space without being and without nature which is nothing but the reality of a measurable quasi-void. Man, but man without horizon. A sacrilegious act . . . [T]he old heavens, the heavens of religions and contemplation, the sublime and pure “up there,” was effaced in an instant, emptied of the privilege of inaccessibility, replaced by another absolute, the space of scientists, which is nothing but a calculable possibility. (p. 70)

Our current scientific development tells us that if gravity remains the symbol of our common condition, it is no longer an earth-bound condition, one we observe with the universal detachment of inductive reasoning and that keeps us rooted to the ground. Defying gravity by escaping the earth’s atmosphere only amplifies our rootlessness and places us more spectacularly before the infinities that terrified Pascal, whether they be at the infinitesimal or at the galactic levels. In ascending through scientific and technological advance, we only impose on ourselves with greater palpability the gravitas of our displaced condition—Pascal’s midway point, we might say, between the infinite below and the infinite above. But following Pascal, this position does not preclude, or preclude further, as if under some inexorable march of a “secularism,” the unknown that Arendt marked as the region of faith, or what Blanchot in his way called the “outside” (Dehors). Rather, as Dalí’s Christ of St. John of the Cross emblematizes, it brings us closer to it, whether in the name of an art—Dalí had much affinity with Surrealism; Blanchot’s place of the “outside” was most prominent within literature ¹³ —or even, ironically, in the name of science, a science that increasingly thrusts us toward the superluminous darkness of a space we cannot fathom.

If the early-20th-century discovery of a general theory of relativity continues to disorient us, it is because shifting, unstable frames of reference implode our sense of spatiality and along with it the below/above distinction. Or if the following discovery of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or Principle of Indeterminacy, continues to disturb us, it is because when we cannot observe the location of a particle without altering its location, or at least the precise measurement of its location, we lose our sense of a fixed place from which to elevate our perspective, any perspective, and we need yet an even newer organon. And when such a discovery leads to the splitting of the atom, we find our moral and ethical perspectives dangerously, hopelessly, disrupted by turn. For Arendt, it was not the splitting of the atom but our launch into space that most destabilised us. Blanchot concurred, but for a different reason: in that ascent he sees, along with his close friend, the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a certain necessity, even religious necessity: “Truth is nomad” (Blanchot, 2010, p. 72). ¹⁴

If there is an equivalent in today’s world of those weighty events, one that carries the same magnitude of philosophical cataclysm, or of spiritual reorientation, perhaps we will find it in the recent discoveries, or measurable confirmations, of gravitational waves, the latest as recent as October 2017. If as Einstein predicted there is a warp in our space-time fabric, it profoundly warps our sense of where to place ourselves, the topos of our being, with respect to the universe. If gravitational waves result from catastrophic astral collisions, or from two black holes locked in a death spiral, having collapsed into one another, generating energy beyond anything we could imagine, much less calculate, and distorting both space and time with its ripples, wherein now is our universal position? Wherefore now are we? Dalí’s optical distortions (melting clocks, etc.) and trompe l’oeil perspectives dramatize the surrealism of our situation. So too does much of Hollywood’s science fiction, in which the perspectival position no longer originates from upon Earth: in our imagination, we are no longer Earth-bound creatures, and we can easily see ourselves starting elsewhere, even if this elsewhere is as yet no place (the true meaning of utopia). If gravity can no longer be seen in the exclusive terms of an external force acting upon us, but is part of an internal distortion, altering the way we perceive ourselves and our external world, without us fully grasping either how or why, and if this gravity connects us back to the darkness and nothingness of astral generation and black holes, and thus to the birth of the universe before there was matter, then we move closer to the world of mysticism than we commonly think, and the above—the starry heavens full of dark matter and infinite spaces—is paradoxically all too close to home, all too within us. And if we do not dare name this above God, ultimately that too is consistent with the mystics, who saw that even language could not contain what must go beyond the “beyond” and above the “above.”

Conclusion

Whatever our science, very few of us are willing now to follow the mystical Itinerarium or, from a more modern vantage, Blanchot’s Dehors—that is, to enter into the night that stands outside the night of dark space as first witnessed by Gagarin and now by countless satellites and probes we send into weightless space to measure the measureless, to trace the traceless.

The other night is always the other, and he who senses it becomes the other. He who approaches it departs from himself, is no longer he who approaches but he who turns away, goes hither and yon. He who, having entered the first night, seeks intrepidly to go toward its profoundest intimacy, toward the essential, hears at a certain moment the other night—hears himself, hears the eternally reverberating echo of his own step, a step toward silence, toward the void. But the echo sends this step back to him as the whispering immensity, and the void is now a presence coming toward him. (Blanchot, 1989, p. 169)

However much the modern (many would say postmodern) Blanchot may have remained mute about his relationship with traditional mystical theology, ¹⁵ the step he speaks of here rests unambiguously on the mystical ladder of Bonaventure. And it is in line with the “vertical horizon” that moves from Pseudo-Dionysius through Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa all the way to, in his way, Pascal, whose early-modern realities had already reduced the possibilities to a wager, in light of the question he posed, “Is there no substantial truth, seeing that there are so many true things which are not truth itself?” (Pascal, 1995, p. 153). Our late-modern realities open up those possibilities once again. But they do so only by means of the paradox: to abandon ourselves to an above that is within and thus beyond above. To take this step requires less a wager than a still newer organon, one happy to accept, and accept perhaps even axiomatically, the coincidentia oppositorum, even of the physical and the spiritual. And to develop this mode of thinking requires a boldness even greater and more audacious than a launch into space, which, we have repeatedly seen, only forces us to confront our gravity anew. The mystics, long before astronautics, had this temerity. Dalí’s paintings had this temerity. Blanchot’s fictions had this temerity. Our ever-shifting cosmology is moving us again toward new truths. But they remain incalculable—and perhaps, for that very reason, nomadic. The question for us now is whether we might find the gravitas to ascend to them.