‘Let the dead bury their dead’ and that, well, aesthetically, is a wonderful saying

BORGES: And in Christ’s case, he thought in parables, that is, Christ had a special way of thinking. How strange—the person who never seems to have realized this is Milton. Because in Paradise Lost everything is discussed rationally, or, as Pope said, Milton makes Jesus and Satan talk like two schoolmen. How could Milton not realize that Jesus was, in addition to who he was, a style? On the other hand, Blake said that, like himself, Christ wanted salvation through ethics, through the intellect, through aesthetics as well, since those parables are aesthetic creations, and Christ’s metaphors are extraordinary. For example, anyone might have condemned funeral rites, anyone might have condemned funerals, but not Christ. He says: ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ and that, well, aesthetically, is a wonderful saying. One could almost write a story about that, eh? About dead people who bury the dead—a fantastic story.

FERRARI. Certainly.

BORGES. And he always talks like that. Another example is what he says about the stoning of an adulterous woman: ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ They’re extraordinary verbal inventions which haven’t been equalled since, and each one, according to Blake, is a lesson in aesthetics. Now the example of Socrates is extraordinary because although— as far as I know—he hasn’t left a single written line, we do have a sense of him as a person distinct from Plato. Plato doesn’t identify with Socrates—Socrates has his own existence, and will continue to exist in people’s imaginations. And then, one only has to compare this last dialogue of Socrates with the scenes from the Passion in the New Testament . . . because the scenes from the Passion are created precisely to evoke pity.

FERRARI. Confronted with hemlock and with the cross.

BORGES. Yes, confronted with hemlock and with the cross. Yet Socrates doesn’t evoke pity—Socrates speaks as if this weren’t his last conversation. Its power lies precisely in the contrast that we constantly feel between the wonderful reasoning and the wonderful fables that Socrates produces, and the fact that he says all that, well, on the brink of death. Besides, the problem of immortality is especially important for him, since he’s dying as he discusses it. It’s extraordinary, the opposite of pathetic—without any complaint he accepts his fate and carries on talking, as he had done all his life, which is much more important than the fact that he was forced to drink hemlock.

FERRARI. He would have reached that state of calm to which you say one should aspire at a certain stage of life.

BORGES. Well, that’s what Spinoza wanted, of course, because when Spinoza talks about the intellectual love of God, what he means is that one must accept fate knowing that all things are, well, inherently logical, no? And we can see that in the system he employed in his Ethics, the ‘Ordine Geometrico’, since he thought that the universe was also made in that way, that the universe was also logical, that the universe was more or less made in the manner of the geometry of Euclides.

FERRARI. And he would imagine perhaps that his work was also part of that universal harmony.

BORGES. Certainly, since his life and work, well, and our lives and the lives of Spinoza’s readers—they are all part of that infinite divinity.

FERRARI. Of course. Now, you say, Borges, that we’ve lost the capacity to use reason and myth at the same time, but you haven’t personally lost it yourself, if I may say so.

BORGES. No . . . I don’t know if I’ve ever managed to use reason at any time in my life.  As far as myth is concerned, I have made modest myths, well, modest fables, let’s say. In general, one assumes now that there are two types of books. Even in Aristotle’s case—Aristotle had already lost the mythical capacity, although he reasoned admirably, no? Yet in Plato it’s preserved, and there are whole books about Plato’s myths—the myth of Atlantis, for example.

Borges
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