by Umberto Eco
What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed—in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone? This is the case of apocrypha or pseudepigraphs. It is maintained that an object CO coincides with an authentic object that has never actually existed. This is the case of the great forger Han van Meegeren, whose Supper in Emmaus, attributed to Vermeer but actually painted in 1937, was sold (at current values) for two and a half million dollars. When van Meegeren, who was accused of selling Flemish and Dutch works of art to Goering, confessed in the postwar period that these had all been fakes made by his own hand, nobody believed him. To be acquitted of all charges he had to paint another fake in prison to demonstrate his ability.
It is still an open question as to whether such counterfeits are always caused by fraudulent intentions. In theory, a block of marble subjected to the action of water for centuries could be seen as a work by Brancusi, without anyone intending to deceive anyone. Perhaps this was initially the case regarding the fake Modiglianis, if it is true that the persons who made them only did so for fun and then threw them away. But we find an explicit case of pseudepigraphs in the fake Hitler diaries, where the counterfeit is claimed to be an authentic object that never existed.
There are cases in which the counterfeiter knows very well that the original object does not exist, yet believes in good faith that the fake has all the functions that the original object would have had, and presents it as such in its place. This is the typical case of the diplomatic forgery. The medieval monks who produced false documents to backdate or expand the possessions of their abbeys believed, on the basis of the tradition, they had really obtained the privileges in question, and sought only to demonstrate this fact publicly. Paradoxically—at least for a mind dominated by unshakeable prejudice—the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also belong to this type, in the sense that their authors were aware that the book was a fake but held it to be a sacrosanct one because it formulated what they believed were the real plans of the Jews. This is what the well-known anti-Semite Nesta Webster had to say about it in 1924:
The only opinion to which I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols do represent the program of world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies in the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret societies who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
The Fake Ex Nihilo
It is known that there is a set of different objects, all produced by an author A whose fame has been handed down over the centuries (let’s say, all the known works of Picasso). From the whole set A we can derive an abstract type, which does not take into account all the features of the individual members of that set, but rather presents a sort of generative rule (such as the style, or the type of materials used). A fake is produced and it is claimed to be the work of author A. This is the case of the false Picasso sold in 2010 for two million dollars by an antiquarian dealer from Los Angeles, who had paid the counterfeiter a thousand dollars for it. Honestly, on closer inspection, it was worth even less than that, and the victims of the fraud deserve no sympathy. But when, instead, the imitative nature of the object is openly admitted, then we have a work produced in the manner of the artist (either as a tribute or as a parody).
The only case of false attribution in which we can know with certainty that two objects are not identical is the one where someone shows us, for example, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa while standing in front of the original on show in the Louvre, claiming that the two objects are indiscernibly the same one. This is an admittedly unlikely event, yet even in that case the doubt would remain that the alleged fake is really the authentic Mona Lisa, while the one in the Louvre is a fake which has been maliciously (or erroneously) hung on the wall for goodness knows how long—as in, when the painting was found again after the famous theft of 1911.
To prove that a fake is a fake, it is necessary to provide proof of authenticity for the presumptive original.
Proof of Authenticity
Obviously, modern science has many criteria for establishing the authenticity of an original. However, all of these tests seem to aim more at proving that something is fake rather than determining whether it is authentic. A document is false if its material support, such as parchment, does not date from the time of its presumed origins, and today we are able to date finds with considerable accuracy. But while the proof that the Shroud of Turin material dated from the Middle Ages would certainly make it unlikely that the body of Jesus was ever wrapped in it, even if the fabric dated back to the first century of our era, that still would not prove it was used to wrap his body. Modern philologists have shown that the hermetic Asclepius was not translated, as was previously assumed, by Mario Vittorino, because in his texts Vittorino always put the word etenim at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the Asclepius that word appears second in a sentence in twenty-one cases out of twenty-five. Still, if another text is discovered to have etenim always appearing first in the sentence, this does not prove that it was produced by Mario Vittorino.
Sometimes scholars decide to determine whether the conceptual categories, the line of reasoning, the iconological models, and so on, are consistent with the cultural milieu of the presumptive authors. But while it is reasonable to suppose that a text attributed to, let’s say, Plato is false if it contains references to the Gospel of St. John, there is no way to show that a text was written before Christ only because it does not contain any references to the Gospels.
A document is a forgery if the external events it cites could not have been known at the time of its production. Lorenzo Valla denies the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine because, for example, the Donation speaks of Constantinople as a patriarchate when, at the presumed time of its composition, Constantinople went by another name and was not yet a patriarchate. Recent studies on an alleged exchange of letters between Churchill and Mussolini have shown that, despite the genuineness of the paper used, the correspondence must be considered false because, for example, one letter appears to have been written from a house in which by that time Churchill had no longer lived for years; another one deals with events that occurred after the date on the letter.
But if the Donation of Constantine had not mentioned Constantinople, would this prove its authenticity? A text is certainly not by Plato if it mentions the Thirty Years War, but is a text that mentions the Thirty Years War therefore by Descartes?
The prevailing notion of falsification presupposes a “true” original with which the fake should be compared. But we have seen how weak our criteria for determining authenticity are. Moreover, all the aforementioned criteria seem useful only when dealing with “imperfect” fakes. Is there a “perfect fake” that resists any given philological criterion? If today an art forger of the genius of van Meegeren managed to get hold of a poplar board datable to 1500 or thereabouts, if he could get hold of oils and paint identical to those used by Leonardo, and if he replaced the Mona Lisa with a copy that was absolutely perfect in terms of style and execution and capable of reacting positively to all the chemical tests required, would we be able to discover the forgery? And who can say that this has not already happened?
An Optimistic Perspective
Despite this, even though no single criterion is one hundred percent satisfactory, we usually rely on reasonable conjecture based on some balanced assessment of various methods of verification. It is like a trial, where one witness can seem unreliable, but three witnesses who agree are taken seriously; one clue can appear to be weak, but three clues form a system. In all these cases we rely on criteria of interpretative economy. Judgments of authenticity are the result of persuasive arguments, based on proofs that are likely, albeit not entirely irrefutable, and we accept these proofs because it is more reasonably economical to accept them than to spend time casting doubt upon them.
But such verification would be necessary for every judgment of identity. In fact, there is no guarantee that the friend Tom I meet today is the same one as I met yesterday, because Tom undergoes far more physical (biological) changes than a painting or a statue. In addition, the person I believe to be Tom could be Dick who has mischievously disguised himself as Tom (think of master criminal Diabolik’s rubber masks). Tom is not more difficult to counterfeit than the Mona Lisa; on the contrary, it is easier to successfully disguise a person than it is to successfully copy a picture—except that it is usually economically more advantageous to forge a banknote or make a fake statue.
* * *
In order to recognize Tom every day (or in order to decide that the Cathedral I see today is the same one I visited last year), our parents, husbands, wives, and children must rely on certain instinctive procedures based mainly on the social contract. Such procedures are shown to be reliable because, by using them, our species has managed to survive for millions of years. And this proof, based on adaptation to the environment, is enough for us.
On the other hand, not only is it true that we manage to move around the world with some certainty, asserting that something is true even though we are often wrong, but it is also true that those who lie or falsify are almost always found out. It is possible that there are many unrecognized fakes in our museums, or that Julius Caesar lied to us about how the battle of Alesia unfolded, and to this day we do not know whether Nero really was crazy and set Rome on fire or whether he was the victim of malicious historians. But we do know for sure—and on the strength of philological science—that Constantine made no donation. And it is also true that, if a politician announced a tax cut and then the cut was not made, the massive presence of the facts would tell us that the politician had lied. Hannah Arendt takes a pragmatic view in her 1971 “Lying in Politics”:
secrecy—what diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government—and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
But in the end, when faced with the notorious Pentagon Papers documenting how the American government has lied about various aspects of the conduct of the Vietnam War, she judges the lie to be untenable. Noting that the official line does not stand up in light of the facts, she classifies that form of systematic lying as an offense against factuality that, when it becomes so generalized, engenders a pathological politics. And comparison with the unvarnished facts has led to the recognition that the CIA’s allegation that Saddam Hussein was preparing nuclear weapons was a lie.
Along with disavowal as a result of the facts, there is disavowal resulting from the contradictions that the compulsive liar is liable to fall into, and this is why it is said that the truth will out.
Referring to his own time (and not ours) Jonathan Swift (or someone else in his circle, since the attribution remains doubtful) published a pamphlet on the art of political lies in which he wrote:
There is one essential point wherein a political liar differs from others of the faculty, that he ought to have but a short memory, which is necessary, according to the various occasions he meets with every hour of differing from himself, and swearing to both sides of a contradiction, as he finds the persons disposed with whom he hath to deal. In describing the virtues and vices of mankind, it is convenient, upon every article, to have some eminent person in our eye, from whom we copy our description. I have strictly observed this rule, and my imagination this minute represents before me a certain great man famous for this talent, to the constant practice of which he owes his twenty years’ reputation of the most skillful head in England, for the management of nice affairs. The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think fit to refine upon him, by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all; and besides, that will take off the horror you might be apt to conceive at the oaths, wherewith he perpetually tags both ends of every proposition; although, at the same time, I think he cannot with any justice be taxed with perjury when he invokes God and Christ, because he hath often fairly given public notice to the world that he believes in neither.
Well, on that occasion, through Swift, the truth spoke out.
[La Milanesiana, 2011]
9. On Some Forms of Imperfection in Art
There is a lot of talk about imperfection, but the concept itself is at risk of remaining imperfect. For example, there is an interesting little book from 1988 by Algirdas Greimas which is called On Imperfection but does not deal with imperfection, and the same year’s In Praise of Imperfection, by Rita Levi-Montalcini, is rather a celebration of those limitations of our brain that make it so beautifully creative: it notes the perfection achieved by the cockroach, in that today’s insect is the true copy of an ancestor that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then, its brain mechanisms have not evolved: they are perfect. The human brain remains imperfect, and this is why it is capable of evolving.
If we look at it in theological terms, man is certainly imperfect compared to God, but if we go along with Levi-Montalcini’s line, perhaps God or nature wanted things this way to guarantee our ongoing creativity.
So let’s fly a little lower. Usually, imperfection is defined with respect to a genre, a canon, or a law.
Thomas Aquinas said that the criteria for beauty are proportio and claritas (and these would seem clear) but also integritas. Integritas meant wholeness, and hence quae diminuta sunt eo ipso turpia sunt (those who are impaired are by that very fact ugly). In down-to-earth terms, this meant that dwarfs were imperfect because they lacked the right height, and the same went for the crippled whatever they might lack. Likewise, in the thirteenth century, in his Tractatus de bono et malo, William of Auvergne held that a person was ugly if he had three eyes or only one, in the first case because the feature was unbecoming and in the second for not having what was proper. A thing is imperfect, therefore, if it has too much or too little with respect to the norm.
The problem of perfection as wholeness obsessed Christian thought when it came to defining how the bodies of the dead would be resurrected on the day of universal judgment. They would be as whole as they were when alive, agreed, but at what point in their life? The way they were at twenty, or at sixty? Let’s assume at the moment of their death. But if by the time of their death they were missing an arm or had gone completely bald, would they rise in that state?
In quaestio 80 of the Supplementum, Aquinas wonders if the intestines will be resurrected. While they are a part of the human body, a person would certainly not be able to rise again full of filth, or even with empty intestines, because nature abhors a vacuum. And what about the arm that was rightly amputated from a thief, who later did penance and was saved—should the arm be recovered given that it did not cooperate in the salvation of the penitent? On the other hand, how could it be eliminated, when its absence would constitute a punishment for someone by this time in a state of bliss? Aquin
as responded by saying that, just as a work of art would not be perfect if it lacked something that art requires, so must man be resurrected in perfection—and therefore, it is all the limbs of the body must be reconstituted upon resurrection.
So the intestines will rise again and be full not of ignoble waste but of noble humors. As for the repentant thief, even though that amputated limb played no part in his attaining glory afterwards, nonetheless he deserves to be rewarded with all his parts intact.
But will the hair and nails rise again? It is said that they are produced by superfluous food like sweat, urine, and other excrement, which certainly will not be resurrected with the body. But the Lord has said, “Not a hair of your body will perish.” Hair and nails were given to man as ornaments. Now, the human body, especially that of the elect, must be resurrected in all its beauty. So it must rise again complete with hair and nails.
On the other hand, the genitals will not be resurrected, given that in heaven the blessed shall “neither marry nor be given in marriage.” The same holds for sperm, which do nothing for the perfection of the individual, as hair does, but only for the perfection of the species. This would suggest that in heaven you can get a shampoo and set, but you cannot have sex.
The other problem, previously raised by St. Augustine, is what would happen to a man devoured by cannibals. In Augustine’s view the flesh that has nourished the cannibal is later dissolved, but since God the Almighty can take back what has vanished, it will be returned to the individual who was devoured: it was, so to speak, borrowed by the cannibal and must be returned to whomever it belonged. It would be absurd to think that, while not even a hair of the head can be lost, pounds and pounds of flesh might go missing.