It is strange to reread Borges’ Collected Fictions for the first time since becoming Catholic. I enjoy, as I always do, his wonderful intelligence and obscure erudition. I enjoy his taste in literary themes (mirrors, labyrinths, paradoxes, dreams) and I marvel again at his arresting prose style in which each sentence is machine-tooled to achieve the greatest poetical impact with an optimal economy of means. I recognise, too, the influence Borges’ has had on me, not only the way he writes and what he writes about but also in his basic method of operating: Taking an idea and developing it to its ultimate logical consequences—the circle of infinite circumference that is, ipso facto, an infinite straight line. Borges, it is true, is only my second-favourite writer. [1] But he is also the most important writer I have read and one I will revisit with pleasure and gratitude. And yet after my most recent trip through his Collected Fictions I am left with a lingering qualm. Let me begin by pointing out that what is most affecting about Borges is not simply his intelligence, erudition and fine prose style nor his penchant for paradoxes and literary puzzles: It is his careful orchestration of those things to evoke something more elusive and profound. “I felt deep within me,” Kazantzakis has one of his characters say, “that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” On encountering these lines an alert reader of Borges may have occasion to pick up his copy of Labyrinths and reread the Introduction by James E. Irby. “Borges,” Irby writes, as though paraphrasing Kazantzakis, “uses mystery and the surprise effect in literature to achieve that sacred astonishment at the universe which is the origin of all true religion and metaphysics.” Irby’s choice of words has appealing implications for a Catholic reader; implications that Irby is quick to dismiss—lest anyone accuse Borges of believing in God. “Borges as theologian,” he assures us in the very next line, “is a complete heretic—as the casuistical Three Versions of Judas more than suffices to show.” I think this touches on a key tension underlying Borges’ fiction that seems to result from two competing tendencies: A tendency to seek the Transcendent and an equal and opposite tendency to take refuge from the Transcendent in relativism. I will try to explain what I mean. The first tendency: Again and again, as though by homing instinct, Borges is drawn to the Transcendent. Let us take a representative example. In a plot central to The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, a Bombay law student commits an impulsive murder and flees across the plethoric Indian subcontinent. Along the way, he encounters a variety of people—among whom are many that seem to manifest different degrees of the same spiritual joy. The student infers that the hard-to-define but immediately recognisable stamp of radiance on the faces of these people is the afterglow of their encounter with a mystical being whom he calls Al-Mu’tasim. In an obsessive quest to find Al-Mu’tasim, the student undertakes a pilgrimage to Hindustan—following the bread-crumb trail of enlightened lives Al-Mu’tasim leaves in his wake. At last he comes to a gallery, “at the end of which there is a doorway and a tawdry curtain of many beads, and behind that, a glowing light.” A man’s voice (“the incredible voice of Al-Mu’tasim”) bids the student enter. He obediently draws back the curtain and steps into the room. At that point, the story ends… The student’s crime, his long pilgrimage, a perfect being that is the source and consummation of all spiritual joy, the final promise of “mystical plenitude” and redemption—the theological significance of all this does not require explication. God also figures in The Zahir (“Perhaps I will succeed in wearing away the Zahir by thinking and re-thinking about it; perhaps behind the coin is God”); the coda to The Theologians and is a central plot element of The Secret Miracle. Many of Borges’ other stories either presuppose the existence of God or portray characters who seek and sometimes obtain knowledge of him. At a minimum, then: The existence of God, the possibility of his existence, is something in which Borges appears to take a serious interest. The second tendency: As though confusing the eternality and immutability of the Transcendent with monotony, Borges seeks refuge from it in the variety offered by an idle relativism where he is free to play at constructing and deconstructing worldviews for literary effect. [2] “Attracted by metaphysics,” explains Maurois in his Preface to Labyrinths, “but accepting no system as true, Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind.” According to the rules of this game, religious and philosophical ideas are, “esteemed for their aesthetic value and for what is marvellous in their content.” The Eternal Recurrence; hell; life as a dream within a dream; reincarnation; the elasticity of time; idealism; solipsism—it does not matter to Borges whether any of these ideas are true; it matters only that they are interesting. Borges thereby affords himself great latitude in constructing his labyrinth. And why, asks Maurois, should any of us wander in it? For merely aesthetic reasons: His “‘vertiginous symmetries’ have their tragic beauty.” Maurois captures the general point more pithily, if more blandly, when he concludes: “The form is more important than the content.” If I am not mistaken, these two tendencies are operative until as late as 1960 (I am looking at the Contents page of the Collected Fictions which lists all his stories in chronological order) for in that year Borges publishes Argumentum Ornithologicum, a playful argument for the existence of God extrapolated from the number of birds seen in a fleeting vision, and Inferno I, 32, in which God speaks to Dante’s leopard in a dream. By 1969, however, Borges appears to have resolved the tension at the cost of his spiritual imagination. In a small volume aptly called In Praise of Darkness, we find not a single spark of the Transcendent. Even a piece called A Prayer turns out to be a lugubrious denial of the ordinary objects of human spiritual desire: After pretending not to understand the Lord’s Prayer, Borges insolently proposes his own—in which he suggests that causal determinism rules out the possibility of miracles, for which reason there is no point in asking for anything in prayer; suggests that forgiveness is worthless (“forgiveness is the act of another, and only I myself can save me”), for which reason there is no point in seeking it; and finally confesses that his only real wish is to, “die completely.” Borges will publish only three more books of fiction in his lifetime. Brodie’s Report (1970), which describes the misadventures of Argentine gauchos and street toughs (knife fights, murders, feuds, duels—all somehow so sublunary, so un-Borgesian) can be safely forgotten. The Book of Sand (1975) has some fantastical elements (a double, an inter-dimensional monster, an enchanted book with infinite pages) but none of those stories quite rises to the Transcendent and all of them are notable for a certain lack of vitality, a certain malaise. The tone of the book is, I think, set by A Weary Man’s Utopia in which the pessimism and spiritual dereliction of A Prayer are amplified to an unbearable pitch. In this brief, bleak story the narrator visits a man in the distant future who explains the state of civilisation. The Summa Theologica is now classified with Gulliver’s Travels as a tale of fantasy. No one cares about facts—in school, they are taught Doubt and the Art of Forgetting. We have seen shades of this sort of thing before (vide Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)but never this dark, never without the moderating insinuation of the Transcendent: In a subsequent paragraph we learn that personhood has been dispensed with (the narrator cannot tell his visitor his name because in the future people call each other Somebody or You) and that even humanity is in a state of dissolution—couples are permitted only one child (“it is not advisable that the human race be too much encouraged”) and there are ongoing discussions about the “advantages and disadvantages of the gradual or simultaneous suicide of every person on Earth.” Hitler (this is the tale’s final flourish) is remembered as, “the philanthropist who invented the crematorium.” I am aware, of course, that a writer’s characters do not necessarily represent a writer’s character. What reason is there to suppose that Borges’ views are those set out in A Weary Man’s Utopia? But on the final verdict of Borges on the existence of God there can be little doubt. In 1984, Osvaldo Ferrari put the question to him directly: Do you believe in God? “If God means something in us that strives for good,” Borges tritely replied, “then yes. If he’s thought of as an individual being, then no, I don’t believe.” There follows a vague appeal to the problem of evil and a complaint that the Trinity is to him, “quite inconceivable.” Nor can there be any doubt that his atheism was accompanied by a deep pessimism. “I disbelieve in an afterlife,” he reported in an interview with Willis Barnstone in 1980, “and I hope I shall cease. What I am looking for is not utter blackness, for blackness is something after all. No, what I want is to be forgotten.” What I have said so far can now be summarised in a single sentence: In the work of Borges we seem to find an inverse ratio between his openness to the Transcendent and his pessimism; and we observe that when this openness is strangled off, the pessimism intensifies until it culminates in something approaching to a loathing of existence. How tidily all this matches to Lewis’ Argument from Desire. Man, the argument goes, has a haunting desire for the Transcendent that nothing on Earth can satisfy; he is, as a Thomist would put it, ordered towards the Transcendent. Even a cursory study of the history of human civilisation suffices to prove the point: It is obvious, perhaps more obvious than anything else, that man is a religious animal who desires spiritual transcendence and immortality. In all but the final stories of Borges, too, we see this desire exemplified with amazing intelligence, variety and creativity. [3] On the assumption that there is a God such desires should not surprise us: It is not plausible that God would create beings for a relationship with himself and fail to endow them with the faculty and motivation to seek it; nor is it plausible that physically embodied beings made in the image of an Eternal Spirit should manifest no awareness of or propensity for eternal and spiritual things. Nor should it surprise us that the frustration of such desires produces feelings of pessimism, futility and despair. “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” writes Augustine in his Confessions, “and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” In the language of natural law, atheism is a perversion of man’s rational faculty, the ultimate purpose of which is the knowledge of God. To flatly deny the objects of our natural desire for the Transcendent is to frustrate the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to flourish as the kinds of things we are; it is to become a being at odds with itself and with its Ultimate Reality; to transform one’s existence into a performative contradiction. Having disavowed God with Sartre and Camus, Borges must follow them to the conviction that nausea and absurdity are the essence of the human experience. It is tragic but understandable that a man who has destroyed his own telos should be moved to say, “I hope that I shall cease.” This saddens me as a Catholic, of course, but also as a reader. I noted at the onset of this that what is profound and affecting about Borges is not his erudition, choice of subject or prose style but his use of these to produce in his readers a sacred astonishment at the universe. Essential to this task is, I believe, an openness to the Transcendent—precisely what we see dwindling away after 1969. It is notable that the public repudiation of God, the confessed longing for nonexistence and the appearance of those stories least capable of inspiring sacred astonishment all coincide. I am troubled, too, by the perilous folly of “esteeming religious and philosophical ideas for their aesthetic value”—a procedure as perverse as “solving” a mathematical problem by having possible answers read out loud and choosing the one that is easiest on the ear. It is amazing that the point should even have to be made—but it matters greatly whether our beliefs are true; and it matters greatly that it matters to us that they are true. I know nothing of Borges’ inner life beyond what is revealed in his published work. Is my autopsy accurate? Perhaps it is not. But in closing I have in mind an image that could allegorise the fate of many even if Borges is not among them; an image of the invisible Spirit of God subtly but incessantly witnessing to a man over the course of his earthly life with all that is dazzling, poignant, intelligent, sumptuous, interesting, beautiful and true and which has no reality without Him who is its author and ultimate source—the symmetry of labyrinths; the rational order of encyclopaedias; the marble gaze of statues; the passion and lucidity of Keats and Schopenhauer; the face of a girl from Buenos Aires; the disconsolate cry of a bird; the roar of a high sea; the mystical rose, the tiger, the moon. God, out of love, has given each of us a tremendous and terrible freedom of choice. What happens happens in the secret depths of man’s heart. Perhaps he pursues those things but loses them all because he pursues in the wrong way—with violence, with greed or with envy; or perhaps he makes of one of them an idol; or perhaps he succumbs at last to a vicious self-abnegating flash of vanity or anger or lust or despair. I do not witness the process of repudiation but only its creeping effect: A shadow that slowly darkens the borrowed light of the soul. And if, when we die, we find ourselves separated from the divine love, it may be that God’s heartbreak in that moment is greater than ours.
[1] The worthless honour of being my favourite writer goes to James Joyce. [2] Typically, the tension created by these opposite tendencies emerges in the same story. In The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, for example, the idea that Al-Mu’tasim is God soon competes with others proposed at the end of the story—the preferred one appearing to be that the story is an allegory of metempsychosis. [3] It is worth noting that Borges’ habit of following a postulate through to its ultimate logical consequences parallels the structure of a number of arguments for the existence of God—in particular the Cosmological Argument of Thomas Aquinas and Gottfried Leibniz. In this specific sense, too, Borges was ordered towards the Transcendent by his intellectual temperament.