Ancient
Wisdom Sees the
Universe
As a Volume to Be Read
Jorge
Luis Borges
are
similar to books, there must be also a
resemblance
between a book and a human being
“Philosophy is written
in that very
large book that is
continually opened
before our eyes (I mean
the universe),
but which is not
understood unless first
one studies the language
and knows the
characters in which it
is written. The language
of that book is
mathematical and the characters
are triangles, circles,
and other geometric figures.”
(Galileo Galilei, quoted by JLB)
A 2012 Editorial Note:
Human
beings can be described as living words and sentences in an eternal Book of
Life which periodically undergoes new readings - and new editions.
Individual life unfolds like a book.
It is always being simultaneously written, and read. In the 18th
century, Benjamin Franklin made his famous epitaph:
“The Body of Benjamin Franklin,
printer, like the cover of an old book - its contents torn out, and stripped of
its lettering and gilding - lies here, food for worms. But the book shall not
be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and elegant
edition, revised and corrected by the author.” [1]
The book of life is both individual
and universal, and Helena Blavatsky wrote in her 1888 work “The Secret
Doctrine”:
“The [word] Lipi-ka, from the
word lipi, ‘writing’, means literally
the ‘Scribes’. Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma, the
Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders or Annalists who impress on the
(to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, ‘the great picture-gallery of
eternity’ - a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man, of all
that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in ‘Isis ’[2], this divine and unseen canvas is
the BOOK OF LIFE. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the
passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the universe, upon which the
‘Builders’ reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who stand
parallel to the Seven Angeles of the Presence, whom the Christians recognise as
the seven ‘Planetary Spirits’ or the ‘Spirits of the Stars’; for thus it is
they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal Ideation - or, as thought by
Plato, the ‘Divine Thought’.” [3]
Few, however, are able to “read” in
the tablets of astral light the story of life in our planet, or in the solar
system. In the “Letters From the Masters of the Wisdom” one can see a reference
to the Maha Chohan, a Eastern sage and a Master of Masters - “to whose
insight the future lies like an open page”. [4]
The following text, written in 1951,
is reproduced from “Selected
Non-Fictions”, Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, Penguin Books,
UK
(Carlos Cardoso Aveline)
NOTES:
[1]
See for instance
“Theosophy” Magazine, volume I, August 1913, p. 446.
[2] See “Isis Unveiled”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles
[3] “The Secret Doctrine”, Helena P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles
[4] “Letters From the Masters of the Wisdom”, TPH, Adyar, 1973, first
series, letter 16, p. 41.
On the Cult of Books
Jorge Luis Borges
In
Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that
the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something to
sing about; Mallarmé’s statement, “The world exists to end up in a book,” seems
to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic
justification for evils.
These two teleologies [1], however, do not entirely coincide;
the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to an era of
the written word. One speaks of telling the story and the other of books.
A book, any book, is for us a sacred
object: Cervantes, who probably did not listen to everything that everyone
said, read even “the torn scraps of paper in the streets.” Fire, in one of
Bernard Shaw’s comedies, threatens the library at Alexandria
It is well known that Pythagoras did
not write; Gomperz (Griechische Denker I,
3) maintains that it was because he had more faith in the virtues of spoken
instruction. More forceful than Pythagoras’ mere abstention is Plato’s
unequivocal testimony. In the Timaeus
he stated: “It is an arduous task to discover the maker and father of this
universe, and, having discovered him, it is impossible to tell it to all men”;
and in the Phaedrus he recounted an
Egyptian fable against writing (the practice of which causes people to neglect
the exercise of memory and to depend on symbols), and said that books are like
the painted figures “that seem to be alive, but do not answer a word to the
questions they are asked.” To alleviate or eliminate that difficulty, he
created the philosophical dialogue.
A teacher selects a pupil, but a
book does not select its readers, who may be wicked or stupid; this Platonic
mistrust persists in the words of Clement of Alexandria, a man of pagan
culture: “The most prudent course is not to write but to learn and teach by word of mouth,
because what is written remains” (Stromateis),
and in the same treatise: “ To write all things in a book is to put a sword in
the hands of a child,” which derives from the Gospels: “Give not that which is
holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample
them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” That sentence is from
Jesus, the greatest of the oral teachers , who only once wrote a few words on
the ground, and no man read what He had written (John 8:6).
Clement of Alexandria St. Augustine
“When he [Ambrose] was reading, his
eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and
tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone coming in, nor was it
customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when we were there, we
saw him silently reading and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in
silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we
used to go away. We supposed that in the hubbub of other people’s troubles, he
would not want to be invited to consider another problem. We wondered if he
read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and
intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if
it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult
questions. If his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer
books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used
easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading.
Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he
did.”
That
man passed directly from the written symbol to intuition, omitting sound; the
strange art he initiated, the art of silent reading, would lead to marvelous
consequences. It would lead, many years later, to the concept of the book as an
end in itself, not as a means to an end. (This mystical concept, transferred to
profane literature, would produce the unique destinies of Flaubert and
Mallarmé, of Henry James and James Joyce.) Superimposed on the notion of a God
who speaks with men in order to command them to do something or to forbid them
to do something was that of the Absolute Book, of a Sacred Scripture.
For
Muslims, the Koran (also called “The Book,” al-Kitab)
is not merely a work of God, like men’s souls or the universe; it is one of the
attributes of God, like His eternity or His rage. In chapter XIII we read that
the original text, the Mother of the Book, is deposited in Heaven. Muhammad
al-Ghazali, the Algazel of the scholastics, declared: “The Koran is copied in a
book, is pronounced with the tongue, is remembered in the heart and, even so,
continues to persist in the center of God and is not altered by its passage
through written pages and human understanding.” George Sale observes that this
uncreated Koran is nothing but its idea or Platonic archetype; it is likely
that al-Ghazali used the idea of archetypes, communicated to Islam by the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity
and by Avicenna, to justify the notion of the Mother of the Book.
Even
more extravagant than the Muslims were the Jews. The first chapter of the
Jewish Bible contains the famous sentence: “And God said, ´Let there be light`,
and there was light”; the Kabbalists argued that the virtue of that command
from the Lord came from the letters of the words. The Sepher Yetzirah (Book of the Formation), written in Syria or
Palestine around the sixth century, reveals that Jehovah of the Armies, God of
Israel and God Omnipotent, created the universe by means of the cardinal
numbers from one to ten and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. That
numbers may be instruments or elements of the Creation is the dogma of
Pythagoras and Iamblichus; that letters also are is a clear indication of the
new cult of writing. The second paragraph of the second chapter reads:
“Twenty-two fundamental letters: God drew them, engraved them, combined them,
weighed them, permutated them, and with them produced everything that is and
everything that will be.” Then the book reveals which letter has power over
air, and which over water, and which over fire, and which over wisdom, and
which over peace, and which over grace, and which over sleep, and which over
anger, and how (for example) the letter kaf,
which has power over life, served to form the sun in the world, the day
Wednesday in the week, and the left ear on the body.
The
Christians went even further. The thought that the divinity had written a book
moved them to imagine that he had written two, and that the other one was the
universe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon declared
in his Advancement of Learning that
God offered us two books so that we would not fall into error: the first, the
volume of the Scriptures, reveals His will; the second, the volume of the
creatures, reveals His power and is the key to the former. Bacon intended much
more than the making of a metaphor; he believed that the world was reducible to
essential forms (temperatures, densities, weights, colors), which formed, in
limited number, an abecedarium naturae
or series of letters with which the universal text is written [3]. [4]
Sir
Thomas Browne, around 1642, confirmed that “Thus there are two Books from
whence I collected my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of His
servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto
the Eyes of all: those that never saw Him in the one, have discover’d Him in
the other” (Religio Medici I, 16). In
the same paragraph we read: “In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is
the Art of God.” Two hundred years passed, and the Scot Carlyle, in various places
in his books, particularly in the essay on Cagliostro, went beyond Bacon’s
hypothesis; he said that universal history was a Sacred Scripture that we
decipher and write uncertainly, and in which we too are written. Later, Léon
Bloy would write:
“There
is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows
what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas
correspond, or what his real name is,
his imperishable Name in the registry of Light…. History is an immense
liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the
versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and
is profoundly hidden.” (L’Ame de Napoleon,
1912)
The
world, according to Mallarmé, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the
versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the
only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.
NOTES:
[1] Teleology is that part
of philosophy or religion which discusses the cause and the purpose of life and
the universe. (C. C. A.)
[2] Note by Jorge Luis Borges: The commentators have noted that
it was customary at that time to read out loud in order to grasp the meaning
better, for there were no punctuation marks, nor even a division of words, and
to read in common because there was a scarcity of manuscripts. The dialogue of
Lucian of Samosata, Against an Ignorant
Buyer of Books, includes an account of that custom in the second century.
[3] Note
by Jorge Luis Borges: Galileo’s works abound with the concept of the
universe as a book. The second section of Favaro’s anthology (Galileo Galilei: Pensieri, motti e sentenze;
Florence, 1949) is entitled “Il libro
della Natura.” I quote the following paragraph: “Philosophy is written in
that very large book that is continually opened before our eyes (I mean the
universe), but which is not understood unless first one studies the language
and knows the characters in which it is written. The language of that book is
mathematical and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric
figures.”
[4] Regarding Note [3] above, a “book of nature” whose
language is mathematical, and whose characters are circles, triangles and other
geometric figures, corresponds to the occult records kept by Initiates in their
own language, Senzar. See “The Secret
Doctrine”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., volume I, pp. 1-22; and also “The
Voice of the Silence”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Preface. (C. C. A.)
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Date of publication, June 2012.
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