The Receding Horizon: God as the Outermost and the Innermost

There is a peculiar pattern in the history of human religiosity that tends to go unnoticed precisely because it unfolds so slowly. As humanity’s knowledge expands—whether outward into the cosmos or inward into the architecture of the self—God does not become easier to locate. He recedes. Or rather, the horizon recedes, and we find that what we took to be the boundary of things was never the boundary at all. The Quran captures this dynamic with extraordinary compression in a single verse:

These four names form two pairs of paradoxes, and together they describe not merely a theological assertion but an experiential reality that every generation of seekers has encountered. God is not somewhere within the range of things. He is at both extremities simultaneously, and the extremities keep moving.

The Expanding Outer Horizon

The earliest religious instinct placed the divine at the summit of visible elevation. Mountains were holy because they were the highest accessible places, the points where earth strained toward heaven. The people of antiquity had their god dwell on Olympus, on Sinai, on Zion. This was not primitive superstition so much as a coherent spatial theology: if the divine is above, it is farthest above at the mountain’s peak. Worship quite naturally oriented itself upward, toward altitude, toward the place where earth ended, and sky began.

But then the sky itself became legible. Astronomy revealed that the heavens were not a solid vault studded with lamps but a vast and layered space, governed by mathematical regularities. The planets moved in calculable orbits. The sun was a star. The divine, which had once seemed to reside just beyond the clouds, was pushed further out—not eliminated, but relocated. The sky was no longer the boundary of things, so it could no longer be the home of the divine in the naive topographical sense. A new theology had to emerge, one in which God was not simply higher than the mountain but beyond the heavens altogether.

Then the heavens themselves were revealed to be almost incomprehensibly vast. The Milky Way is not the universe but a single galaxy among hundreds of billions. The observable universe stretches some 46 billion light-years in every direction, and what lies beyond its edge—if “beyond” even applies—is unknown. As each cosmological frontier was crossed, God was not found there waiting. The divine horizon kept receding. Each time humanity said, “Surely here is the outer limit, and beyond it the divine,” the limit turned out to be merely a new threshold. What a less attentive reading of history might call the end of the belief in God is better understood as the progressive revelation that God is not at any particular place but is rather the condition of there being any place at all—the Outermost in the sense that no outward journey ever exhausts or arrives at Him.

This is not a failure of theology. It is, arguably, its vindication. The Quran does not say God is beyond the seventh heaven in the way a king is beyond a border. It says He is al-Zahir—the Outermost or the Apparent, —which can also be understood to mean that He is more apparent than anything, that all of creation is in a sense His self-disclosure, His sign. The receding of the spatial horizon is not God retreating but the finite world revealing its own inexhaustibility as a mirror of the infinite. As one looks further out, one does not approach God’s location; one confronts an ever-deeper display of His signs, what the Quran elsewhere calls ayat—proofs, verses, manifestations.

The Deepening Inner Horizon

The same pattern governs the inward direction. Where once the seat of the self, the soul, the mind—and by extension, the divine presence within—was understood to be simply “the heart,” meaning the physical organ at the chest, the journey inward has proven equally endless. The discovery that the brain is the seat of experience moved the investigation upward and inward simultaneously. Then came the architecture of the brain itself: billions of neurons forming trillions of connections, with consciousness emerging from electrochemical processes whose relationship to subjective experience remains, after centuries of inquiry, genuinely mysterious.

Psychology pushed the analysis further still. Freud, Jung, and those who followed them argued that the self visible to introspection is not the whole self—that beneath conscious awareness lies a vast unconscious architecture, full of drives, images, symbols, and patterns that shape behavior without being directly accessible to reflection. The inner horizon, like the outer one, turned out not to be the limit. Jung went further and proposed that beneath the personal unconscious lies something more collective, a stratum of shared human symbolism so deep and universal that it begins to look less like an individual psychological phenomenon and more like something transpersonal—something that connects rather than separates, something that ancient people might have recognized as the sacred.

Neuroscience has added its own layers. The “self” that introspection presents as unified and continuous turns out to be a construction—assembled moment by moment from competing neural processes, none of which individually has the property of consciousness or selfhood. The more carefully one looks, the more the sense of a stable inner core dissolves into process, into pattern, into something that cannot quite be grasped because the act of grasping is itself part of the phenomenon being grasped. Mystics in nearly every tradition have made precisely this observation and drawn from it a theological conclusion: the further inward one journeys, the more the solid self becomes transparent, and what shines through is not the self at all.

It is striking that this same paradox appears in one of the earliest and most enigmatic collections of sayings attributed to Jesus. In the Gospel of Thomas—a text that preserves what many scholars regard as an ancient strand of Jesus’s teaching oriented toward direct, experiential knowledge—Saying 3 records:

If those who lead you say to you, “See, the kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. — Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3

The formulation is remarkable in several respects. It does not merely assert that the kingdom is within—the half of the saying that is more familiar from Luke 17:21—but insists that it is simultaneously outside of you. The kingdom cannot be spatially located in the sky or the sea precisely because it is not the kind of thing that occupies a region of space. It is not further out than the birds or deeper in than the fish; it is both innermost and outermost at once. Those who lead the seeker to look in a specific place—whether upward or outward—have already missed the point, because the kingdom is the condition of all looking, not one of its objects. The Thomas saying thus anticipates, in compressed and paradoxical form, the very dynamic that the Quran names with its paired divine attributes: the reality being sought is at both extremities simultaneously, which is another way of saying it transcends the spatial framework within which the search is being conducted.

The journey inward is not a journey toward the self but, paradoxically, a journey through the self toward its own ground, which turns out to be something other than the self. Al-Batin—the Innermost or the Hidden—is not simply hiding behind the self the way an object hides behind another object. He is the depth below which there is no further depth, the ground of interiority itself.

The Two Journeys as One Testimony

What makes these passages in the Quran philosophically remarkable is not simply that it names God as both Outermost and Innermost, but that it names both simultaneously. These are not two different aspects of God accessible in two different ways. They are the same reality encountered in two directions. The verse implies that outward and inward journeys, if pursued far enough, arrive at the same place—or rather, the same non-place, the same presence that is not located in the way things are located.

This has a structural analogue in certain areas of mathematics and physics. In cosmological models that posit the universe as finite but unbounded—like the surface of a sphere in higher dimensions—traveling sufficiently far outward brings one back to one’s origin. The outer limit curves back. Similarly, in discussions of the quantum and sub-quantum structure of matter, the distinction between the very large and the very small tends to collapse: cosmology and particle physics turn out to be intimately connected, the behavior of the universe in its first moments requiring the same equations that describe the behavior of the smallest subatomic particles. Inner and outer, at sufficient extremity, rhyme.

41:53 makes this convergence explicit. God promises to show humanity His signs on the horizons and within themselves—fi al-afaq wa fi anfusihim—until the truth becomes clear. The two directions of inquiry are not alternatives but complements. The person who explores the outer cosmos and the person who undertakes deep inner reflection are, if they attend carefully, encountering the same evidence from different angles. The signs on the horizon and the signs within the self are proofs of the same reality, and their convergence—the fact that the physics of the very large and the very small are connected, that consciousness and cosmos seem to share a strange intimacy—is itself, the verse implies, part of the evidence.

The Gospel of Thomas saying gestures at this same convergence from the opposite direction. Rather than pointing outward toward the horizons and then inward toward the self, it begins by ruling out naive outward locations—the sky, the sea—and then insists that what is sought is both within and without. The kingdom cannot be located because it is not a location. It is the ground of all location. This is structurally identical to the theological content of al-Zahir and al-Batin: not the furthest point of the outer journey, not the deepest point of the inner journey, but the condition that makes both journeys possible.

And if God is the foundation of all location—the origin from which every outward horizon extends and every inward depth descends—then the journeys of exploration are not only searches but returns. The Quran states this with quiet finality:

Indeed, we belong to God, and indeed to Him we shall return. — Quran 2:156

This is not merely a consolation offered at the moment of death. It is a cosmological statement about the structure of existence itself. The seeker who pushes outward through the cosmos and the contemplative who descends inward through the self are both, without necessarily knowing it, tracing a path back to the source from which they came. The signs encountered along the way—in the horizons and within the self—are not foreign discoveries but recognitions, intimations of an origin that was never truly left behind. To seek God outward or inward is, in this sense, less like a journey into unknown territory and more like the long memory of something always already known.

You shall remember Me, that I may remember you, and be thankful to Me; do not be unappreciative. — Quran 2:152

The Epistemological Implication

There is a temptation, when God keeps receding beyond each new frontier, to conclude that the search has failed. That what looked like the divine presence at the edge of the sky turns out to be merely more sky, and what seemed like the divine ground of the self turns out to be merely more neurons, and so on indefinitely. This is the secularist reading of the same history: every time we said “God,” we were really pointing at our ignorance, and as knowledge expands, the God-hypothesis shrinks.

But the verse in 57:3 suggests a different interpretive frame entirely. God is not the name for the gap in our knowledge. He is not waiting to be found at whatever the current frontier happens to be. He is the Outermost, which means He is beyond any frontier that can be reached—not as a placeholder for ignorance but as the condition of there being any frontier at all. A frontier is always a frontier of something—of space, of matter, of consciousness—and the Outermost is not behind the frontier but is what makes the frontier possible. Likewise the Innermost is not a deeper layer of neurons to be discovered but the ground of there being any interiority at all.

This reframing means that the endless recession of the divine horizon is not a theological embarrassment but a theological confirmation. Each time the frontier expands—each time what seemed like the limit of things reveals itself as merely a new threshold—the implicit claim of 57:3 is vindicated: this is not where God is located, and the journey is not over. The universe has not yielded a bottom, and the self has not yielded a core that is simply empty. Both keep opening onto something further. This endless opening is itself the sign.

But crucially, the signs are not only at the frontier. This is the point the secularist reading misses entirely. The recession of the horizon does not leave behind an emptied landscape—it reveals that every point already traversed was itself saturated with meaning. The galaxy that is no longer the edge of the universe is no less astonishing for that. The neuron that is no longer the seat of the soul is no less extraordinary. Every layer of the cosmos that science has mapped—every structure of matter, every pattern of life, every fold of consciousness—is a sign, not because it marks where God is hiding but because it displays what the Quran calls ayat: evidence, manifestation, proof, disclosure. The journey outward through the horizons and the journey inward through the self are not searches that will one day arrive; they are traversals of a reality that is, at every point along the way, already testifying. There is no depth too small and no distance too vast to be empty of that testimony. The signs are not at the end of the road. They are the road.

Conclusion

What the paired divine names of 57:3 describe is not a static theological claim but a dynamic of encounter. God as the Outermost and the Innermost is not a description of where God can be found but of what happens when looking—in either direction, at any depth, at any cosmic scale—is pursued with sufficient seriousness. The honest seeker, whether astronomer or contemplative, discovers the same thing: the territory does not end. The universe is larger than the largest picture we can form of it. The self is deeper than the deepest account we can give of it. And the convergence of these two inexhaustibilities—the fact that outer and inner both refuse closure—is precisely the testimony of a reality that is not itself an object in the world but the ground of there being a world at all.

This is why the birds cannot take you there and the fish cannot precede you. The kingdom—the divine reality—is not at any point on the outward journey, nor at any depth of the inward one. It is, as Thomas insists, and as the Quran confirms, simultaneously outside and inside: the horizon that is always ahead of you, and the journey that is within you, and the same in both directions.

There is one final dimension to this that the Quran expresses with particular precision:

The Arabic root at the heart of this verse—daraka—carries a double meaning that no single English word can fully render. It means both to encompass spatially and to comprehend mentally. The verse is therefore making two claims simultaneously: no vision can see God fully, and no mind can grasp God fully—but He sees and grasps all things. The faculty you would use to locate or understand God, whether the eye that scans the horizon or the mind that plumbs the depths of the self, is itself something He contains rather than something capable of containing Him.

This brings the entire argument into focus. We have traced the recession of God along two axes—outward into the cosmos, inward into the self—and found that both journeys open endlessly without arriving. But there is a third recession, equally vertiginous: the epistemological one. The mind that reaches for comprehension finds that comprehension itself is encompassed. You cannot think your way to the boundary of God because thinking is already within that boundary. The seeker cannot get outside of God to look at Him, because the looking is already inside Him.

The spatial, the experiential, and the cognitive all arrive at the same threshold. The outer horizon recedes. The inner depth has no floor. And the very act of comprehension—idrak—turns out to be one more thing that is encompassed rather than encompassing. What remains is not frustration but orientation: the recognition that the one who seeks is already held within what is being sought, that the signs on the horizons and within the self are not directions to follow but presences to recognize, and that the awareness capable of recognizing them is itself a sign.

God will show us His signs on the horizons and within ourselves. The two journeys are one testimony, offered in stereo, until the truth becomes clear.