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Comment on Borges and Chesterton

I found a brief remark on Chesterton and his contrast with Borges in Volume XI of the First (or perhaps the second) Encyclopedia of Tlön, which is shelves in its proper place in the library of Babel, unless, of course, by lottery the Babylonian Company has determined the move its location. If so, and the book cannot be found, I will ask Funes, whose memory is sharper than my own, to repeat it to me.

Oh, no, my mistake. This remark comes from an article titled "The Gnostic imagination of Jorge Luis Borges" written by Robert Royal in Christianity Today.

The point presumably is that fantastic unreality had already overcome large parts of the earth. Borges’s predecessor G. K. Chesterton had made similar points earlier in the century, but with an illuminating difference. GKC had solved the dilemma of the deadly literalness of modem reason on the one hand, and the flight into pure fantasy on the other, with the paradoxical nature of real Christianity. The infinitely forking paths, clue less labryrinths, Achilles-and-the-hare problems, libraries of Babel, Kabbalistic numerologies, and Gnostic mysteries that held Borges’s attention all his life were for Chesterton a "false infinity." When Chesterton made the movement towards sanity that brought him to Christianity, he regarded all those unconcludable journeys on which the mind could embark as not worth the true infinity of the concrete objects in God’s Creation. Borges finds the everyday world a sorrow to escape by embracing infinite mind; Chesterton finds the everyday world a delight too large to be encompassed by our poor senses and weak wits.

Again and again, Chesterton writes a metaphysical story or essay to say that, should you forsake the sanity of the everyday, there is a nightmare world that awaits you behind what you mistake for the moment as liberation. Borges, though mildly troubled by the world his imagination reveals to him, has no such sharp recoil from the abyss, perhaps because he had none of Chesterton’s deep concern for the public and private welfare of human beings. Borges seems merely to say: this is the labyrinth we enter when we begin to reflect, and there is no remedy for it except to savor its intellectual vistas.

 
About

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

April 14, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
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