Borges, Buddhism and the Eternal Recurrence

The relationship between Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, and Nietzsche is, perhaps, a little more complex than some would allow. Consider Borges' Lecture on Buddhism. Here is a brief sampler:

The history of the universe is divided into cycles and in these cycles there are long eclipses during which there is nothing or in which only the words of the Veda remain. Those words are archetypes which serve to create things. La divinity Brahma also dies and is reborn. There is a quite pathetic moment when Brahma is in his palace. He has been reborn after one of the calpas, after one of the eclipses. He walks through the rooms, which are empty. He thinks of other gods. The other gods appear at his command, and they think that Brahma has created them because they were there before.

Let’s pause at this vision of the history of the universe. There is no God in Buddhism; or there could be a God, but it isn’t the essential thing. What is essential is that we believe that our destiny has been predetermined by our karma or karman. If I was to be born in Buenos Aires in 1899, if I was to be blind, if I am to be giving this lecture to you tonight, it is all the result of my previous life. There isn’t a single event in my life which hasn’t been predetermined by my previous life. This is what is called karma. Karma, as I have already said, is like a mental structure, an extremely fine mental structure. We are weaving and inter-weaving in every moment of our lives. For not only our volitions, our deeds, our semi-dreams, our sleep, our semi-waking are woven: we are perpetually weaving that thing [karma]. When we die another being is born who inherits our karma

There is, of course no act of redemption; no defining moment; no unique event; no singular point in time, and no Saviour. History, in other words, does not hinge on an instant. If Christ returns he will be received by The Grand Inquisitor. It is the same, but different.

Our Father, Which Art in Hell-the Brilliance of Borges

Ah, Labyrinths, do you know Labyrinths, that sublime compilation by the Argentinean master, Jorge Luis Borges? It’s difficult to find words to describe Borges’ oeuvre in any sufficient way; he wrote so much, poems, essays and fiction. But, honestly, there is more to it than that: he crosses the frontiers between the essay and the story, between fact and fiction: he gives fiction, better said, the appearance of fact.

I’m looking at Labyrinths, his collection of ‘fictions.’ It is quite superb. He writes with a clear, polished and highly precise style. His texts, always brief, perhaps even terse at some points, are rich with all sorts of ‘references’, both real and imagined. In Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Terteris he discovers, by a process of textual investigation, a totally idealist world, as might have been imagined by Bishop Berkley, where external objects are whatever one imagines them to be. But the story or fiction I want to focus on here is Three Versions of Judas.

This concerns a Swedish theologian by the name of Nils Runeberg, who makes a unique discovery in the course of his textual and philological investigations, a discovery others find absurd or blasphemous: God incarnate is not Christ-he is Judas Iscariot.

Runeberg’s major work published in German in 1912 as Der heimliche Heiland, Borges tells us-and let me say once again that this is fiction-that this work begins by stressing the superfluity of Judas’ act of betrayal. Why would such a thing have been necessary? Jesus was a public figure, known to thousands. The elements combine to make Judas’ crime, treason, all the more vile: the kiss, the thirty-pieces of silver, the suicide. The act was not passing, it contains nothing of the moment: it was preordained and thus has a “…place in the economy of redemption.”

You see the Word, so is supposed, has become Flesh in the person of Christ, but the Burden, the burden of carrying all the sins and suffering of humanity, has become Flesh in the person of Judas. The lower has become the mirror of the higher; Judas is the mirror of Christ, and burns forever for his sins and ours. The witness was not that of Christ’s Passion, the act of a single day, but an eternity of suffering.

So proceeds Runeberg (so proceeds Borges, which I may have to remind you); so his thesis is published; and so it is rejected. He continues to work, refining, adapting and perfecting his argument. The prophecy contained in Isaiah 53: 2-3, the prophecy of the man of sorrows is not that of moment but “….a whole atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh.”

God made himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; he could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.

His book is re-published; it is scorned and it is ignored. The author has a moment of epiphany: God did not wish the great secret to be known on earth. Had he not himself fallen into the great blasphemy: had he not revealed the secret name of God? In his fevered anxiety Runeberg runs through the streets of Malmo, “…begging at the top of his voice that he be granted the grace of joining his Redeemer in Hell.”

Runeberg dies in 1912, having added, Borges tells us, to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, “the complexities of evil and misfortune.”