Examining an Infinite Sphere, the Center of
Which is Everywhere, and the Circumference Nowhere
Jorge Luis Borges
A 2012 Editorial Note:
In her classical work “The Secret Doctrine”, Helena Blavatsky wrote:
“… The primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to globe,
from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere having been with all nations the
emblem of eternity and infinity - a serpent swallowing its tail. To realize the
meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from its centre. The
field of vision or of thought is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one’s
self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up boundless vistas
all around. It is the symbolical circle of Pascal and the Kabalists, ‘whose
centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere’ (…)”. (“The Secret Doctrine”, Helena
P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Company, Los Angeles, volume I, p. 65.)
The Russian thinker also said:
“…The definition of Deity by the Circle is not Pascal’s at all, as E.
Levi thought. It was borrowed by the French philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus
or Cardinal Cusa’s Latin work, De
Docta Ignorantia, in which he makes use of it. It is, moreover,
disfigured by Pascal, who replaces the words ‘Cosmic Circle’, which stand
symbolically in the original inscription, by the word Theos. With the ancients both words were synonymous.” (“The
Secret Doctrine”, volume II, p. 545.)
In the following text, Jorge Luis Borges shares the same viewpoint
adopted by H. P. Blavatsky.
He practices contemplation of universal truths while examining philosophical
aspects of human history. Writing to the great public with a high degree of
bibliographical erudition, Borges hides his esoteric philosophy in humour and
irony. [1]
We have added the subtitle.
(Carlos Cardoso Aveline)
Pascal’s
Sphere
Jorge Luis
Borges
Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors.
I should like to sketch one chapter of that history.
Six centuries
before the Christian era Xenophanes of Colophon, the rhapsodist, weary of the
Homeric verses he recited from city to city, attacked the poets who attributed
anthropomorphic traits do the gods; the substitute he proposed to the Greeks
was a single God: an eternal sphere. In
Plato’s Timaeus we read that the
sphere is the most perfect and most uniform shape, because all points in its
surface are equidistant from the center.
Olof Gigon (Ursprung der
griechischen Philosophie, 183) says that Xenophanes shared that belief; the
God was spheroid, because that form was the best, or the least bad, to serve as
a representation of the divinity. Forty years later, Parmenides of Elea
repeated the image (“Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose
force is constant from the center in any
direction”). Calogero and Mondolfo believe that he envisioned an infinite, or
infinitely growing sphere, and that those words have a dynamic meaning
(Albertelli, Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after
he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum plotted a laborious cosmogony,
in one section of which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water compose an
endless sphere, “the round Sphairos,
which rejoices in its circular solitude.”
Universal
history followed its course. The too-human gods attacked by Xenophanes were
reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one god, Hermes
Trismegistus, had dictated a variously estimated number of books (42, according
to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to
the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were
written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third
century, form the so-called Hermetica. In
one part of the Asclepius, which was
also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain
de Lille - Alanus de Insulis - discovered this formula, which future
generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratic spoke of an
endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a
statement is a contradictio in adjecto,
because the subject and predicate negate each other. Possibly so, but the
formula of the Hermetic books almost enables us to envisage that sphere. In the thirteenth century the image reappeared
in the symbolic Roman de la Rose,
which attributed it to Plato, and in the Speculum
Triplex encyclopedia. In the sixteenth century the last chapter of the last
book of Pantagruel referred to “that
intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference
nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God
is in each one of his creatures, but it not limited by anyone of them. “Behold,
the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27).
The geometrical metaphor of the sphere must have seemed like a gloss of those
words.
Dante’s poem has
preserved Ptolemaic astronomy, which ruled men’s imaginations for fourteen
hundred years. The earth is the center of the universe. It is an immovable
sphere, around which nine concentric spheres revolve. The first seven are the
planetary heavens (the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn); the eighth, the Heaven of Fixed Stars; the ninth, the
Crystalline Heaven (called the Primum Mobile), surrounded by the Empyrean,
which is made of light. That whole laborious array of hollow, transparent, and
revolving spheres (one system required fifty-five) had come to a mental
necessity. De hypothesibus motuum
coelestium commentariolus was the timid title that Copernicus, the disputer
of Aristotle, gave to the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos.
For one man, Giordano Bruno, the breaking of the sidereal vaults was a
liberation. In La cena de le ceneri he
proclaimed that the world was the infinite effect of an infinite cause and the
divinity was near, “because it is in us even more than we ourselves are in
us.” He searched for the words that
would explain Copernican space to mankind, and on one famous page he wrote: “We
can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of
the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” ( De la causa, principio e uno, V).
That was written
exultantly in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later
not one spark of that fervor remained and men felt lost in time and space. In
time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there will not really be
a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the
infinitesimal, there will not be a
where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the
size of his face. In the Renaissance humanity thought it had reached adulthood,
and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno, Campanella, and Bacon. In the
seventeenth century humanity was intimidated by a feeling of old age; to
vindicate itself it exhumed the belief of a slow and fatal degeneration of all
creatures because of Adam’s sin. (In Genesis 5:27 we read that “all the days of
Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; in 6:4, that “There were
giants in the earth in those days.”) The
elegy Anatomy of the World, by John
Donne, deplored the very brief lives and the slight stature of contemporary
men, who could be likened to fairies and dwarfs. According to Johnson’s
biography, Milton feared that an epic genre had become impossible on
earth. Glanvill thought that Adam, God’s
medal, enjoyed a telescopic and microscopic vision. Robert South wrote, in
famous words, that an Aristotle was merely the wreckage of Adam, and Athens,
the rudiments of Paradise. In that jaded century the absolute space that
inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a
liberation for Bruno, was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the
universe, and yearned to adore God. But God was less real to him than the hated
universe. He was sorry that the firmament could not speak; he compared our
lives to those of shipwrecked men on a desert island. He felt the incessant
weight of the physical world; he felt confused, afraid, and alone; and he
expressed his feelings like this: “It [nature] is an infinite sphere, the
center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” That is the text of
the Brunschvicg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941),
which reproduces the cancellations and the hesitations of the manuscript,
reveals that Pascal started to write effroyable:
“A frightful sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the
circumference nowhere.”
Perhaps
universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.
Buenos Aires, 1951.
NOTE:
[1] The text “Pascal’s Sphere” is reproduced from
the volume “Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952”,
by Jorge Luis Borges, University of Texas Press, Translated from Spanish by
Ruth L.C. Simms, 1993, 205 pp. Copyright
English version, University of Texas Press. The subtitle - “Examining an
Infinite Sphere, the Center of Which is Everywhere, and the Circumference
Nowhere” - has been added by us. (CCA)
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On the role of the esoteric movement in
the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical
Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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