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
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
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
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 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
Perhaps universal
history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.
NOTE:
[1] The text “Pascal’s Sphere”, is reproduced from
the volume “Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952”,
by Jorge Luis Borges, University
of Texas Press University of Texas Press
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