object:The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
class:Essay
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
I
t may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors.
The purpose of this note will be to sketch a chapter of this history.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of
Colophon, wearied of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, lashed
out at the poets who attributed anthropomorphic traits to the gods, and
offered the Greeks a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere. In the
Timaeus of Plato we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most
uniform figure, for all points of its surface are equidistant from its center;
Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands
Xenophanes to speak analogically: God is spherical because that form is best
—or least inadequate—to represent the Divinity. Parmenides, forty years
later, rephrased the image: "The Divine Being is like the mass of a well-
rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction."
Calogero and Mondolfo reasoned that Parmenides intuited an infinite, or
infinitely expanding sphere, and that the words just transcribed possess a
dynamic meaning (Albertelli: Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a
few years after his death, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum
constructed a laborious cosmogony: a stage exists in which the particles of
earth, water, air and fire make up a sphere without end, "the rounded
Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude."
Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom
Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to
demons—although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus,
had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of
Alexandria; 20,000 according to Hamblicus; 36,525 according to the priests
of Thoth—who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.
Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the
third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of
these fragments, or in the Asclepius, which was also attributed to
Trismegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis)
discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, the following formula, which
future ages would not forget: "God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The Pre-Socratics spoke
of a sphere without end; Albertelli (as Aristotle before him) thinks that to
182speak in this wise is to commit a contradictio in adjecto, because subject and
predicate cancel each other; this may very well be true, but still, the formula
of the Hermetic books allows us, almost, to intuit this sphere. In the
thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose,
where it is given as a citation from Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum
Triplex; 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 is nowhere and which we call God." For the
medieval mind the sense was clear—God is in each one of His creatures, but
none of them limits Him. "The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain
thee," said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometric metaphor of the sphere
seemed a gloss on these words.
Dante's poem preserved the Ptolemaic astronomy which for 1,400
years reigned in the imagination of mankind. The earth occupies the center
of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it circle nine concentric
spheres. The first seven are "planetary" skies (the firmaments of the Moon,
Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn); the eighth, the firmament
of the fixed stars; the ninth, the crystal firmament which is also called the
Primum mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the Empyrean, which is
composed of light. All this elaborate apparatus of hollow, transparent and
gyrating spheres (one system required 55 of them) had come to be an
intellectual necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus
is the timid title which Copernicus, denier of Aristotle, placed at the head of
the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos.
For one man, for Giordano Bruno, the rupture of the stellar vaults was
a liberation. He proclaimed, in the Cena de la ceneri, that the world is the
infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, "for it is
within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves." He searched
for words to tell men of Copernican space, and on one famous page he
inscribed: "We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that
the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere"
(Delia causa, principio ed uno, V).
This phrase was written with exultation, in 1584, still in the light of
the Renaissance; seventy years later there was no reflection of that fervor
left and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the
past are infinite, there can not really be a when; in space, because if every
being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there
183be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows
the size of his own countenance. In the Renaissance, humanity thought to
have reached the age of virility, and it declares as much through the lips of
Bruno, of Campanella, and of Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity
was cowed by a feeling of senescence; in order to justify itself it exhumed
the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures consequent on
Adam's sin. (We know—from the fifth chapter of Genesis—that "all the
days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years"; from the sixth
chapter, that "there were giants in the earth in those days.") The First
Anniversary of John Donne's elegy, Anatomy of the World, lamented the
very brief life and limited stature of contemporary men, who are like
pigmies and fairies; Milton, according to Johnson's biography, feared that
the appearance on earth of a heroic species was no longer possible; Glanvill
was of the opinion that Adam, "the medal of God," enjoyed both telescopic
and microscopic vision; Robert South conspicuously wrote: "An Aristotle
was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise." In
that dispirited century, the absolute space which had inspired the hexameters
of Lucretius, the absolute space which had meant liberation to Bruno,
became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and
would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the
abhorred universe. He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak,
and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt
the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright
and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: "Nature is an infinite
sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
Thus do the words appear in the Brunschvicg text; but the critical edition
published by Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which reproduces the crossed-out
words and variations of the manuscript, reveals that Pascal started to write
the word effroyable: "a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere."
It may be that universal history is the history of the different
intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
book class:Labyrinths
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