Spaces Engaged and Transfigured: Alejandro García-Rivera’s Journey from Little Stories to Cosmic Reconciliation

It is an honor and privilege to provide these comments on the life and work of a truly remarkable theologian, Alejandro García-Rivera. He produced so many insights into such a range of areas within a period of time that was all too short. He was a doctoral student of mine, but more importantly, a valued colleague and a dear friend. The breadth of his theological vision was nothing short of astounding. Its depth was truly awesome. It will take us some years to be able to appreciate fully and to digest all he offered us over the nearly two decades of his career. While it would be difficult to give an overall assessment, what we can do here is explore some of the many facets of his thought, and seek out connections among them that came to intrigue him over the years. Perhaps too we might be able to thread together in some tentative fashion some of those ideas, so as to make a first sketch of what his legacy is for us.

The theme I have chosen is his fascination with spaces of different kinds—how he engaged them, and how in so doing he changed how we have come to think about them. In speaking of “space” in his theological work, I will be using that concept in all its variety, as I believe he did: physical space, interior space, social space, and cosmic space. Alex’s thought about space changed and developed through the course of time; by looking at those changes we can see how other theological concerns that occur time and again in his writings interacted with and illumined those concepts of space. There is an almost harmonic quality to those reflections, like the change-ringing of church bells. I think exploring these harmonics will give us insight into important aspects of his thought.

There is another reason I wish to take up his understanding of space. In the last year or so of his life, he was much taken with the work on space and place by the Chinese-American human geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan. Although Alex had written extensively on space (and place) in his book, The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology (2009),¹ Tuan’s work had opened new vistas for him. In the last six months of Alex’s life, he had initiated a conversation with me about our writing a book together (he said “a paper or a book,” but he had too many ideas for a single paper). Although building a suitable anthropology to inhabit his cosmological vision was at the center of his ideas (he spoke of it as an “anthropodicy of beauty”), our conversations centered around concepts of space and place. It was, I believe, the next step after—or more deeply into—The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology. This is a conversation we were not able to complete. What I hope to do here is trace a trajectory of his thought up to those last months, and perhaps suggest where it may have further gone.

I will now examine four kinds of space which Alex explored, three in his published works, and the fourth that he was perhaps envisioning: the semiotic place of the subaltern, the interior space of the wound, the space and place of the garden, and the cosmic space of the final reconciliation.

THE SEMIOTIC SPACE OF THE SUBALTERN: THE “LITTLE STORIES”

Alex utilized the study of semiotics in his doctoral dissertation to explore the subaltern spaces created by the victims of the violent and unequal Encounter in the Americas, documented in history texts as the Conquista. Semiotics is a method that looks at the interactions of signs and meaning, and the various relationships they generate. Its roots lie in continental European linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century and the structuralism introduced by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. These interactions and network of relationships create a meaning-laden world, called by the Russian semiotician, Juri Lotman, a “semiosphere.”²

Alex saw...