1 - The fearful spheres of Pascal and Parmenides

Summary

One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, once penned an essay titled “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal” (Borges 1962, pp. 189–92). It begins, in Borges's exquisite parody of the academic authorial voice: “It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. The purpose of this note will be to sketch a chapter of that history.”

The essay then commences with Xenophanes, who was revulsed by the poets of his time who sang the praises of anthropomorphic gods, and so offered in their place a single god, one who was an eternal and perfect sphere. Next Borges traces the metaphor of the Divine Sphere through its various vicissitudes from classical Greece to medieval Europe and thence to Bruno and Pascal. Although the metaphor of the sphere is the common denominator throughout, it glacially sheds some connotations and gathers others. Through time, the gods become God, and God becomes conflated with Nature; the universe grows from a closed bounded sphere to an infinite one; and throughout, man shrinks and shrinks to a puny insignificance. By the time Pascal took up the metaphor, he started to write, “Nature is a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges points out in his mock pedantic tone that Pascal later crossed out the word “fearful.”