Agony in the Garden?: Evaluating the Cosmology of Alejandro García-Rivera in View of the “Little Story” and the “Principle of Foregrounding”

One cannot engage the work of Alejandro García-Rivera without being struck by the capaciousness of his theological creativity and insight. It is this capaciousness to which Robert Schreiter nods when he observes the diverse concepts of space that García-Rivera engages throughout his work. Schreiter delineates four concepts of space in the work of his former student, naming them: “the semiotic space of the subaltern, the interior space of the wound, the space and place of the garden, and the cosmic space of the final reconciliation.”¹ Despite the distinctness of each of these spatial concepts, Schreiter detects “an almost harmonic quality” underlying the diverse character of García-Rivera’s work.² In this essay, I will first affirm the harmonic quality resonating throughout the corpus of García-Rivera’s theology and suggest a way of accounting for this quality. I will then, however, shift my focus to a point of tension found within García-Rivera’s conceptions of space and argue that this point of tension can be leveraged to further develop his broad theological vision. In particular, I will assert that García-Rivera’s cosmology represents a problematic shift in the way in which he attends to the problem of evil. I will then suggest a way in which his cosmology might be further nuanced by retrieving his previous work on semiotics and aesthetics.

Toward the end of his career, García-Rivera revealed what might be understood as the unifying ground from which his diverse theological endeavors emerged. Here I am referring to what García-Rivera himself termed his “mystical experience of hell”—his vision of a nuclear holocaust that he feared he was helping to create through his work as a scientist for Boeing.³ “What does one do with a mystical vision of hell?” García-Rivera asks after recounting this experience.⁴ His own response to this vision, one can observe, was characterized deeply by repentance. García-Rivera resigned from his job at Boeing and, after a religious conversion, began his theological and pastoral work. It is this posture of repentance that informs the entire scope of his theological corpus. If García-Rivera feared that his endeavors as a scientist would be remembered for helping to bring hell to Earth, his work as a theologian is characterized by its consistent effort to contest the evils of domination and open up space for the deeper realization of beauty and justice in the world. One can detect the manner in which this intention informs each of García-Rivera’s major theological works.

In St. Martín de Porres: The “Little Stories” and the Semiotics of Culture (1995), García-Rivera explores the manner in which “little stories”⁵—the petit narratives of popular religion—were employed by Amerindian, mulatto, and mestizo populations in the Americas to subvert the “big story” of Christianity insofar as that big story was told for the purpose of sanctioning Spanish conquest. Through his exploration of the little stories surrounding the life of Martín de Porres, García-Rivera demonstrates how such stories affirmed the dignity of the culturally marginalized. As such, these little stories had the power of giving voice to the “subaltern” and, in so doing, reconfigure the big story of Christianity.⁶

The desire to resist the various forms of domination is also present in García-Rivera’s work on aesthetics. In The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (1999), he is not so much concerned with reflecting upon beauty in itself as he is in highlighting the subversive character of Gospel beauty. He underscores this character by developing theologically the concept of “foregrounding:”

The subversive aesthetic norm and the aesthetic principle of ‘foregrounding’ was discovered by Jan Mukarovsky when he wondered how it is that a poem converts a bunch of words, even a meaningful bunch of words, into something more, into something of Beauty. Mukarovsky noticed that the sense of Beauty was created in the...