Antiquitopia

August 3's edition of the New Yorker has an article by Joan Acocella discussing Judas traditions with special focus on the Gospel of Judas. Did Judas deserve this fate? If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process—Christ’s Passion—whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. And, if the friend should happen to be the Son of God, so much the worse for you. For two thousand years, Judas has therefore been Christianity’s primary image of human evil. Now, however, there is an effort to rehabilitate him, the result, partly, of an archeological find. In 1978 or thereabouts, some peasants digging for treasure in a burial cave in Middle Egypt came upon an old codex—that is, not a scroll but what we would call a book, wi...

The NYTimes has a nice piece on the American Short Story. Short Stories don't get as much press, as much attention, as much respectability as the long prose fiction (i.e., novels). But all the great long prose fiction writers (e.g., Melville) were masters of the short form as well. For anyone who reads this blog with regularity, I obviously love the Argentinian short story writer, Jorge Luis Borges. But, for those who wish to stick closer to home, I have three words: Edgar Allen Poe! The short form perhaps reached its highest respectability, at least in European and subsequently American trajectories, in an ironically huge volume: Boccaccio's Decameron , which is a collection of 100 short stories in a larger narrative frame (it is actually 101 stories for those who are paying close attention). We could go back even further to One Thousand and One Nights , etc. The short form has been with us for a long time, in fact, and according to the NYTimes article, is poised for ...

From the great theologican, Jorge Luis Borges, a new argument...well, by comparison to medieval and early modern thinkers...of God's existence: I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer--not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, etc.--is inconceivable. Ergo , God exists. (Jorge Luis Borges, "Argumentum Ornithologicum"; trans. Andrew Hurley) Who needs the "ontological argument" when you ...

I was amused by this line from Borges's short story, "The Aleph": ...as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn't get all scrambled up together overnight... (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"; trans. Andrew Hurley) Indeed! How did he know that they didn't scramble up overnight and rearrange themselves when he reopened the book? (I would think this is an observation Borges would appreciate!)

Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through teh twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite had been lost? Men have lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and all long to be that pilgrim (envisioned in the Empyrean, beneath the Rose) who in Rome sees the Veronica and faithfully murmurs: "My Lord, Jesus Christ, true God, and was this, then, the fashion of thy semblance?" Thre is a stone face beside a road with an inscription saying "The True Portrait of the Holy Face of the God of Jaen"; if we really knew what it was like, the key to all parables would be ours and we would know if the carpenter's son was also the Son of God. Paul saw it as a light which hurled him to the ground; John saw it as the sun when it blazes in all its force: Theresa of Leon saw it many times, bathed in a tranquil light, and could never determine the color of its eyes. We have lost these features, j...

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (Borges, "Kafka and His Precursors," trans. James E. Irby; emphasis original) This sentence includes a footnote: See T.S. Eliot: Points of View (1941), pp. 25-26.

What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, all , world ,...

That's right, according to Reuters , Virgin Mary gave birth on Christmas Day to a baby boy, whom she named Jesus. Virgin Mary's husband or Jesus' father is a carpenter by trade. Peruvian Jesus born to Virgin Mary on Christmas Mon Dec 29, 2008 10:02am EST LIMA (Reuters) - Virgin Mary, a 20-year-old Peruvian woman, gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas day and named him Jesus, Peru's state news agency said on Friday. The baby's father, Adolfo Jorge Huamani, 24, is a carpenter. Religious Peruvians compared him to Joseph the Carpenter in the Bible. "Two thousand years later the story of Bethlehem is relived," read the headline about the birth in El Comercio, the main newspaper in Peru, a predominantly Catholic country. The mother, Virgen Maria Huarcaya, delivered the 7.7 pound (3.5 kg) boy, Jesus Emanuel, in the early hours of Christmas at the central maternity hospital in Lima, the capital. "A few days ago we had decided to name my son after a professio...

For those furiously revising and revisiting Judas traditions in the wake of the discovery and continued study of the Gospel of Judas, it might do some good to read Borges' short story, "Three Versions of Judas." It is, as usual, labyrinthine in presentation, provocative, and amazing! The story, using basically just the canonical Gospels and some heresiological reports, revises the relationship between Jesus, God, and Judas. It suggests that Judas seems unnecessary. For a teacher who performs public miracles in the day and has a large following, it should not be difficult to find him. Therefore, Judas' betrayal seems superfluous. It seems to exist only for the purpose of damning Judas. Yet it is a superfluity that signals that something else is going on in the story, something subterranean. The Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless satisfaction to change and death; in order to correspond to such a s...

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men. Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon. (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Shape of the Sword," trans. Donald A. Yates)

I was reading Borges' short story, "Funes the Memorious." It is the tale of a Uruguayan boy who, one day, falls off a horse and, when he awakens, sees the world anew. In fact, he has perfect perception--he can see clearly all the most minute details. He can feel the most subtle changes in temperature, etc. At the same time, he awakens to a perfect memory. He remembers everything, absolutely everything. Every detail, every sight, every sensation. He can recall a day, but to do so takes an entire day. By comparison, our perception and memory are a dreamlike haze: For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was paralyzed. The fact scarcely interested him. He reasone...

It seems like I am thinking about Babel/Babble lately with my last post and just (re)reading "Library of Babel" by Borges. I had read this short story in college, and it has persisted in my memory ever since. This library is eternal and infinite. Each room is a hexagon with the same number of shelves and books on each wall (except two). Two walls lead to adjacent hexagons, while a spiral staircase infinitely moves up and down to different floors with ever new hexagons. There are no two books alike in the library, but the books contain all possible combinations of twenty-five symbols, with all possible syntaxes, languages, books, writing, and, well, babble. As such, this same blog posting will be already found somewhere in the library (as well as any past and future postings I may write and miswrite). The inhabitants of this library are called librarians. The main character is a librarian who has been searching for the book of books, the catalogue of catalogues, all of...

For my winter break, I am reading Borges. In Borges, worlds collide, or rather they infiltrate one another. They are not the infiltrations of worldviews or of governments into one another, although secret societies are involved. Rather, it is the mutual infiltration of fantasy and reality. How reality becomes fantastic or fantasy becomes real. It is the task of imagining a world. A world of pure imagination, and yet to imagine is to rearrange what you know--or, more accurately, rearrage what you perceive. Perceptions become reversed, as in a mirror, turned upside-down and twisted all around, until you find a world of fantasy, a world of pure imagination. And then, once Borges has set up this alternate world of pure fiction and imagination, he starts pulling the threads of reality. He begins to drain our perceived world of its reality and the imagined world feels more real. In fact, it begins to impinge on our reality, or, perhaps more accurately, this imagined world begins to manifest ...