Borges and God by Jorge Luis Borges | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

24/08/16 11:11 a.m.

Borges and God

Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari

In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio dialogues with the
Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari. Forty-five of them have just been
translated into English for the first time by Jason Wilson and will be published this
month by Seagull Books as Conversations, Volume 1. What follows is Borgess
conversation with Ferrari about the existence of God.
The Editors
Osvaldo Ferrari: Many people still ask whether Borges believes in God, because at
times they feel he does and at times that he doesnt.
Jorge Luis Borges: If God means something in us that strives for good, yes. If hes
thought of as an individual being, then no, I dont believe. I believe in an ethical
proposition, perhaps not in the universe but in each one of us. And if I could I would
add, like Blake, an aesthetic and an intellectual proposition but with reference to
individuals again. Im not sure it would apply to the universe. I remember Tennysons
line: Nature red in tooth and claw. He wrote that because so many people talked
about a gentle Nature.
Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

Ferrari: What you have just said confirms my impression that your possible conflict
about belief or disbelief in God has to do with the possibility that God may be just or
unjust.

Jorge Luis Borges at the ruins of Selinunte,

Sicily, 1984

Borges: Well, I think that its enough to glance at the universe to note that justice certainly does not rule. I recall a line
from Almafuerte: With delicate art, I spread a caress on every reptile, I did not think justice was necessary when pain
rules everywhere. In another line, he says, All I ask is justice / but better to ask for nothing. Already to ask for justice is
to ask for much, too much.
Ferrari: Yet, you also recognize in the world the existence of happinessin a library, perhaps, but other kinds of
happiness too.
Borges: That, yes, of course. I would say that happiness can be momentary but that it also happens frequently, it can
happen, for instance, even in our dialogue.
Ferrari: Theres another significant impactthe impact that prompts most poets to hold on to the notion of another world,
a world apart from this one. Because theres always something in the poets words that seems to send us beyond what is
mentioned in the writing.
Borges: Yes, but that beyond is perhaps projected by the writing or by the emotions that lead to the writing. That is, that
other world is, perhaps, a beautiful human invention.
Ferrari: But we could say that in all poetry theres an approximation to something else, beyond the words and the subject
matter.
Borges: Well, language does not match up to the complexity of things. I think that the philosopher Whitehead talks of the
paradox of the perfect dictionary, that is, the idea of supposing that all the words that a dictionary registers exhaust reality.
Chesterton also wrote about this, saying that it is absurd to suppose that all the nuances of human consciousness, which are
more vast than a jungle, can be contained in a mechanical system of grunts which would be, in this case, the words spoken
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by a stockbroker. Thats absurd and yet people talk of a perfect language, of a rich language, but in comparison to our
consciousness language is very poor. I think that somewhere Stevenson says that what happens in ten minutes exceeds all
Shakespeares vocabulary [laughs]. I believe its the same idea.
Ferrari: Throughout your writing, you have referred to whats divine, including the supernatural. You have also accepted,
in one of our dialogues, Murenas words about beauty being able to transmit an otherworldly truth. That is, you seem to
admit that transcendence exists but you dont call it God.
Borges: I do think that its safer not to call it God. If we call it God, then we are thinking of an individual and that
individual is mysteriously three, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, which to me is quite inconceivable. On the other
hand, if we employ other words, perhaps less precise or vivid ones, then we could approach the truth, if an approach to
truth is possible. Or it could be something that we ignore.
Ferrari: Thats exactly why one could think that you do not name God. Even though you believe in the perception of
another reality, besides the everyday one.
Borges: I am unsure if this reality is an everyday one. We dont know if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a
fantastic one, because if, as idealists believe, everything is a dream, then what we call reality is essentially oneiric.
Schopenhauer spoke of the essence (oneiric sounds pedantic, doesnt it?). Lets say, The dream-like essence of life.
Yes, because oneiric suggests something sadlike psychoanalysis [laughs].
Ferrari: Besides faith or its absence, another question is whether you consider love in universal terms, as a power or a
necessary force for the fulfillment of life.
Borges: I dont know if its necessary but, yes, it is inevitable.
Ferrari: I dont mean love between two human beings but what men receive or do not receive, as they receive air or light.
A love that is eventually supernatural.
Borges: At times I feel, how can I put it? Mysteriously grateful. When I have an idea that will later, sadly, become a story
or a poem, I have a sensation of receiving something. But I do not know if that something is given to me by something or
someone or if it bursts out on its own. Yeats held a doctrine of a great memory and thought that it wasnt important for a
poet to have many experiences because he inherited memory from his parents, his grandparents, his great-grandparents.
This multiplies itself in geometric progression until he inherits humankinds memory and this something is revealed to
him. Now, De Quincey thought that memory is perfect, that is, I have in myself everything that I have felt, everything that I
have thought since childhood. But there must be an adequate stimulus to find this memory. He thoughthe was a Christian
that would be the book used in the Final Judgment, the book of everyones memories. And that could lead us eventually
to Heaven or Hell. But, deep down, that mythology is alien to me.
Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind
me of a dialogue between two memories.
Borges: In fact, thats what it is. If we are something, we are our past, arent we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a
biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurateit doesnt matter. Its
there, isnt it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us.
Ferrari: As we have talked about faith or its absence, I want to mention something about our times that seems strange to
me. Over the centuries, men in the Protestant and Catholic West have worried about the dilemma of the souls salvation.
But it seems to me that recent generations do not think that it is even a dilemma.
Borges: That seems pretty serious to me, that a person or people do not possess an ethical instinct or sense, doesnt it?
Moreover, theres a tendency, or a habit, of judging an act by its consequences. Now that seems immoral to me, because
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when you act you know if your acts are evil or good. As for the consequences of an actthey ramify and multiply and
perhaps balance out in the end. I do not know, for example, if the consequences of the discovery of America have been
good or evil, because there are so many. Even as we are talking, they are growing and multiplying. Thus, to judge an act by
its consequences is absurd. But people tend to do this. For example, a contest or a war is judged according to failure or
success and not according to whether its ethically justified. As for the consequences, as I said, they multiply in such a way
that, perhaps in time, they balance out and then become unbalanced again. It is a continuous process.
Ferrari: With the loss of the ideas of salvation and damnation, theres the loss of the ideas of good and evil, sin and virtue.
That is, theres a different version of things that excludes the earlier world view.
Borges: People now only think about whether something is advantageous. They think as if the future doesnt exist, or as if
there is no future other than an immediate one. They act according to what counts in that moment.
Ferrari: And that way of being, of being preoccupied with immediacy, has turned us into immediate beings, perhaps
even into futile ones.
Borges: I completely agree.
November 4, 2014, 1:15 pm

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