Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  When he speaks of disorder and misery with incorruptible words (on mourra seul), he is one of the most pathetic men in the history of Europe; when he applies the computation of probabilities to apologetics, he is one of the most vain and frivolous. He is not a mystic; he belongs to those Christians, denounced by Swedenborg, who suppose that heaven is a reward and hell a punishment and who, accustomed to melancholy meditation, do not know how to speak with the angels.31 God matters less to Pascal than the refutation of those who deny Him.

  The Zacharie Tourneur edition (Paris, 1942) seeks to reproduce, by means of a complex system of typographical symbols, the “unfinished, bristly, and confused” aspect of the manuscript; it is evident that this aim has been accomplished. The notes, on the other hand, are poor. And so, on page 71 of the first volume, there is a fragment that develops the well-known cosmological proof of St. Thomas and Leibnitz in seven lines. The editor, who does not recognize it, observes: “Perhaps Pascal is making a skeptic speak here.”

  Following a number of the texts, the editor cites similar passages from Montaigne or the Sacred Scriptures; this work could be enlarged. For an explanation of the Pari, it would be appropriate to mention the texts of Arnobius, Sirmond, and Algazel that were indicated by Asin Palacios (Huellas del Islam, Madrid, 1941); for an explanation of the fragment against painting, that passage from the tenth book of The Republic, where we are told that God creates the Archetype of the table, the carpenter creates a copy of the Archetype, and the painter, a copy of the copy; for an explanation of Fragment 72 (“Je lui veux peindre l’immensite . . . dans l’enceinte de ce raccourci d’atome . . .”), its prefiguration in the concept of the microcosm, and its reappearance in Leibnitz (Monadologie, 67), and in Hugo (“La chauve-souris”):

  Le moindre grain de sable est un globe qui roule

  Trainant comme la terre une lugubre foule

  Qui s’abhorre et s’acharne . . .

  Democritus thought the infinite yields identical worlds, in which identical men fulfill without variation identical destinies; Pascal (who also could have been influenced by the ancient words of Anaxagoras to the effect that everything is within each thing) included with those identical worlds some worlds inside of others, so that there is no atom in space that does not contain universes; no universe that is not also an atom. It is logical to think (although he did not say it) that he saw himself multiplied in them, endlessly.

  The Meeting in a Dream

  Having traversed the circles of Hell and the arduous terraces of Purgatory, Dante, now in the earthly Paradise, sees Beatrice at last. Ozanam speculates that this scene (certainly one of the most astonishing that literature has achieved) is the primal nucleus of the Commedia. My purpose here is to narrate the scene, summarize the comments of the scholiasts, and make an observation—perhaps a new one—of a psychological nature.

  On the morning of the thirteenth day of April of the year 1300, the penultimate day of his journey, Dante, his labors complete, enters the earthly Paradise that crowns the summit of Purgatory. He has seen the temporal fire and the eternal, he has crossed through a wall of flame, his will is free and upright. Virgil has crowned and mitred him over himself (“per ch’io te sovra te corona e mitrio”) . Along the paths of the ancient garden he reaches a river purer than any other, though the trees allow neither sun nor moon to shine on it. A melody runs through the air, and on the other bank a mysterious procession advances. Twenty-four elders, dressed in white garments, and four animals, each plumed with six wings that are studded with open eyes, go before a triumphal chariot drawn by a griffin; on the right are three women, dancing, one of them so red that in a fire she would barely be visible to us; to the left are four more women, dressed in purple, one of them with three eyes. The coach stops, and a veiled woman appears; her dress is the color of living flame. Not by sight, but by the bewilderment of his spirit and the fear in his blood, Dante understands that she is Beatrice. On the threshold of Glory, he feels the love that so often had pierced him in Florence. Like an abashed child, he seeks Virgil’s protection, but Virgil is no longer next to him.

  Ma Virgilia n’avea lasciati scemi di se,

  Virgilio dolcissimo patre,

  Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi.

  [But Virgil had left us bereft/of himself, Virgil sweetest father,/Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation.]

  Beatrice calls out his name imperiously. She tells him he should not be weeping for Virgil’s disappearance but for his own sins. She asks him ironically how he has condescended to set foot in a place where man is happy. The air has become populated with angels; Beatrice, implacable, enumerates the errors of Dante’s ways to them. She says she searched for him in dreams, but in vain, for he had fallen so low that there was no other means for his salvation except to show him the eternally damned. Dante lowers his eyes, mortified; he stammers and weeps. As the fabulous beings listen, Bea trice forces him to make a public confession. . . . Such, in my bad prose, is the aching scene of the first meeting with Beatrice in Paradise. It is curious, as Theophil Spoerri observes (Einfuhrung in die Gottliche Komodie, Zurich, 1946 ) :”Undoubtedly Dante himself had envisioned this meeting differently. Nothing in the preceding pages indicates that the greatest humiliation of his life awaits him there.”

  The commentators decipher the scene figure by figure. The four and twenty preliminary elders of Revelations 4:4 are the twenty-four books of the Old Testament, according to St. Jerome’s Prologus Galeatus. The animals with six wings are the apostles (Tommaseo) or the Gospels (Lombardi). The six wings are the six laws (Pietro di Dante) or the dispersion of holy doctrine in the six directions of space (Francesco da Buti). The chariot is the universal Church; its two wheels are the two Testaments (Buti) or the active and the contemplative life (Benvenuto da Imola) or St. Dominic and St. Francis (Paradiso XII, 106-11) or Justice and Pity (Luigi Pietrobono). The griffin—lion and eagle—is Christ, because of the hypostatic union of the Word with human nature; Didron maintains that it is the Pope “who as pontiff or eagle rises to the throne of God to receive his orders and like a lion or king walks the earth with strength and vigor.” The women who dance on the right are the theological virtues; those who dance on the left are the cardinal virtues. The woman with three eyes is Prudence, who sees past, present, and future. Beatrice emerges and Virgil disappears because Virgil is reason and Beatrice faith. Also, according to Vitali, because classical culture was replaced by Christian culture.

  The interpretations I have mentioned are undoubtedly worthy of consideration. In logical (not poetic) terms they provide an amply rigorous justification of the text’s ambiguous features. Carlo Steiner, after supporting certain of them, writes: “A woman with three eyes is a monster, but the Poet does not submit here to the restraints of art, because it matters much more to him to express the moralities he holds dear. Unmistakable proof that in the soul of this greatest of artists, it was not art that occupied the first place, but love of the Good.” Less effusively, Vitali corroborates this view: “His zeal for allegorizing drives Dante to inventions of dubious beauty.”

  Two facts seem to me to be indisputable. Dante wanted the procession to be beautiful (“Non che Roma di carro così bello, rallegrasse Affricano” [Not only did Rome with a chariot so splendid never gladden an Africanus] ) and the procession is of a convoluted ugliness. A griffin tied to a chariot, animals with wings that are spotted with open eyes, a green woman, another who is crimson, another with three eyes, a man walking in his sleep: such things seem better suited to the circles of the Inferno than to the realms of Glory. Their horror is undiminished even by the fact that some of these figures proceed from the books of the prophets ( “ma leggi Ezechiel che li dipigne” [but read Ezekiel who depicts them]) and others from the Revelation of St. John. My reproach is not an anachronism; the other paradisiacal scenes exclude any element of the monstrous.32

  All the commentators have emphasized Beatrice’s severity; some, the ugliness of certain em
blems. For me, both anomalies derive from a common origin. This is obviously no more than a conjecture, which I will sketch out in a few words.

  To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god. That Dante professed an idolatrous adoration for Beatrice is a truth that cannot be contradicted; that she once mocked and on another occasion snubbed him are facts registered in the Vita nuova. Some would maintain that these facts are the images of others; if so, this would further reinforce our certainty of an unhappy and superstitious love. With Beatrice dead, Beatrice lost forever, Dante, to assuage his sorrow, played with the fiction of meeting her again. It is my belief that he constructed the triple architecture of his poem in order to insert this encounter into it. What then happened is what often happens in dreams: they are stained by sad obstructions. Such was Dante’s case. Forever denied Beatrice, he dreamed of Beatrice, but dreamed her as terribly severe, dreamed her as inaccessible, dreamed her in a chariot pulled by a lion that was a bird and that was all bird or all lion while Beatrice’s eyes were awaiting him (Purgatorio XXXI, 121). Such images can prefigure a nightmare; and it is a nightmare that begins here and will expand in the next canto. Beatrice disappears; an eagle, a she-fox, and a dragon attack the chariot, and its wheels and body grow feathers: the chariot then sprouts seven heads (“Trasformato così ’l dificio santo/misefuor teste” [Thus transformed, the holy structure put forth heads upon its parts]); a giant and a harlot usurp Beatrice’s place.33

  Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante. Dante very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. All of us tend to forget, out of pity, out of veneration, this grievous discord which for Dante was unforgettable. Reading and rereading the vicissitudes of his illusory meeting, I think of the two lovers that Alighieri dreamed in the hurricane of the second circle and who, whether or not he understood or wanted them to be, were obscure emblems of the joy he did not attain. I think of Paolo and Francesca, forever united in their Inferno: “questi, che mai da me non fia diviso” [this one, who never shall be parted from me]. With appalling love, with anxiety, with admiration, with envy.

  [1948] —Translated by Esther Allen

  John Wilkins’ Analytical Language

  I see that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has omitted the article on John Wilkins. The omission is justifiable if we recall its triviality (twenty lines of mere biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614; Wilkins died in 1672; Wilkins was the chaplain of the Prince Palatine, Charles Louis; Wilkins was appointed rector of one of the colleges of Oxford; Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London; etc.) but inexcusable if we consider Wilkins’ speculative work. He was full of happy curiosity: interested in theology, cryptography, music, the manufacture of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possibility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the principles of a world language. He devoted a book to this last problem: An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (6oo pages in quarto, 1668). Our National Library does not have a copy; to write this note I have consulted The Life and Times of John Wilkins by P. A. Wright Henderson (1910); the Worterbuch der Philosophie by Fritz Mauthner (1924); Delphos by E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1935); and Dangerous Thoughts by Lancelot Hogben (1939).

  All of us, at one time or another, have suffered through those unappealable debates in which a lady, with copious interjections and anacolutha, asserts that the word luna is more (or less) expressive than the word moon. Apart from the obvious comment that the monosyllable moon may be more appropriate as a representation of a simple object than the disyllabic luna, nothing can be contributed to such discussions; except for compound words and derivatives, all the languages in the world (not excluding Johann Martin Schleyer’s Volapük and Peano’s romantic Interlingua) are equally inexpressive. There is no edition of the Royal Spanish Academy Grammar that does not ponder “the envied treasure of picturesque, felicitous, and expressive words in the riches of the Spanish language,” but that is mere boasting, with no corroboration. Meanwhile, that same Royal Academy produces a dictionary every few years in order to define those words. . . . In the universal language conceived by Wilkins in the middle of the seventeenth century, each word defines itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1619, had already noted that, by using the decimal system of numeration, we could learn in a single day to name all quantities to infinity, and to write them in a new language, the language of numbers;34 he also pro posed the creation of a similar, general language that would organize and contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that task.

  He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then subdivided into differences, and subdivided in turn into species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850), a means animal; ab, mammalian; abo, carnivorous; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine; etc. In that of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845), imaba means building; imaca, brothel; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imarri, house; imaru, country estate; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imago, window; bire, bookbinder; hirer, to bind books. (I found this last census in a book published in Buenos Aires in 1886: the Curso de lengua universal [Course in Universal Language] by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

  The words of John Wilkins’ analytical language are not dumb and arbitrary symbols; every letter is meaningful, as those of the Holy Scriptures were for the Kabbalists. Mauthner observes that children could learn this language without knowing that it was artificial; later, in school, they would discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.

  Having defined Wilkins’ procedure, we must examine a problem that is impossible or difficult to postpone: the merit of the forty-part table on which the language is based. Let us consider the eighth category: stones. Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate); moderate (marble, amber, coral); precious (pearl, opal); transparent (amethyst, sapphire); and insoluble (coal, fuller’s earth, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as alarming as the eighth. It reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion, quicksilver); artificial (bronze, brass); recremental (filings, rust); and natural (gold, tin, copper). The whale appears in the sixteenth category: it is a viviparous, oblong fish. These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) in numerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it has parceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions, of which number 262 corresponds to the Pope, number 282 to the Roman Catholic Church, number 263 to the Lord’s Day, number 268 to Sunday schools, number 298 to Mormonism, and number 294 to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism. Nor does it disdain the employment of heterogeneous subdivisions, for example, number 179: “Cruelty to animals. Protection of animals. Dueling and suicide from a moral point of view. Various vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities.” I have noted the arbitrariness of Wilkins, the unknown (or apocryphal)

  Chinese encyclopedist, and the Bibliographical Institute of Brussels; obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is. “This world,” wrote David Hume, “was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is t
he work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on . . .” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion V [1779]). We must go even further, and suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, then we must speculate on its purpose; we must speculate on the words, definitions, etymologies, and synonymies of God’s secret dictionary.

  The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe can not, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though it is clear that they are provisional. Wilkins’ analytical language is not the least remarkable of those schemes. The classes and species that comprise it are contradictory and vague; the artifice of using the letters of the words to indicate divisions and subdivisions is undoubtedly ingenious. The word salmon tells us nothing; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the person versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly river fish with reddish flesh. (Theoretically, a language in which the name of each being would indicate all the details of its fate, past and future, is not inconceivable.)

  Hopes and utopias aside, perhaps the most lucid words written about language are these by Chesterton: “Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. . . . Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really pro duce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire” (G. F. Watts [1904], 88).