Complete knowledge has long been a goal of many philosophers and scientists. The search for a total system able to describe the universe in all its complexity is, perhaps, an impossible goal, but it is nevertheless the case that modern technology has made great strides in expanding the angles from which the cosmos can be examined. Despite this success, however, it is unclear whether the proliferation of such knowledge has done any radical good for the spiritual life of humanity, and one may be forgiven for questioning whether the pursuit of total knowledge is not somehow flawed in its premises.
Jorge Luis Borge’s short story “The Aleph” centers upon the discovery of a point in space that contains all other points. This “microcosm,” which gives the story its name, allows the viewer to see the entirety of the cosmos from every possible angle at once as a shining mirror of infinite complexity. The story is narrated by a man who describes himself as being hopelessly devoted to a dead woman named Beatriz. The narrator is shown the Aleph by Beatriz’s cousin, Carlos Argentino. Laying on his back in Argentino’s cellar, he sees the Aleph underneath the nineteenth step of the stairway:
Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.
The Aleph, as a point from which every other point in the cosmos is visible, is reminiscent of much modern technology, especially the Internet, and Borges himself makes this comparison when Carlos Argentino gives his “apologia for modern man.” In a clear reference to the Aleph, which he has not yet revealed, Argentino describes the modern person as “ ‘in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins. . . .’ ” Despite the Internet’s incapacity to reveal every angle of the cosmos simultaneously, the parallels between it and the Aleph are obvious, and when seen in the light of technological comparison, the story provides remarkable insight into the meaninglessness of the vast reaches of ultimately loveless knowledge that modern technology makes available.
Although the narrator describes the Aleph as evoking “infinite veneration, infinite pity,” it is clear that the experience has only a mild effect upon his character. Indeed, only moments after rising from where he saw the infinite point, he intentionally suggests to Carlos Argentino that the Aleph is a delusion, feigning ignorance and pity as a means of revenge for the man’s obnoxiousness and pride. Agentino’s own character, moreover, is scarcely better. He is consistently described as pompous, and his poetry, for which he has employed the visions provided by the Aleph, is described as unremarkable. These facts all suggest the incapacity of the Aleph to transform those who encounter it in any profound sense, and the narrator appears consistently preoccupied with other matters. Indeed, the story does not end with reverie or veneration for the cosmos or for the Aleph that contains it, nor even with regret that the Aleph has been destroyed by the demolition of Argentino’s house or that its memory is slipping from the narrator’s mind. Rather, it ends with the melancholy statement, “Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.”
This Beatriz, who absorbs the narrator more than the Aleph, is clearly an allusion to Beatrice Portinari, the muse of Dante Alighieri, who became the poet’s guide to the upper reaches of paradise in The Divine Comedy. For the narrator of “The Aleph,” Beatriz is, as Portinari was for Dante, a symbol of beauty, love, perhaps even the divine. Both women are the focus of an unutterable love and devotion that overrides all other considerations despite the fact that neither man ever entered into a close relationship with his respective love. Dante’s Beatrice became a guide to the heavens, a conduit through which the divine may pour, and the Beatriz of “The Aleph” is a figure with similar resonances.
Nor is this where the similarities to Dante end. Indeed, the whole story may be read as an inverted Paradiso, in which the main character, a poet, is lead by another poet (as Dante by Virgil) and by the influence of Beatriz to a revelation. Rather than ascend to the heights of heaven, however, he descends into a cellar. Rather than being granted a vision of the infinite God, he is given a vision of the cosmos in all its brokenness, its frailty, its corruption. Among the infinite objects of the Aleph, the narrator sees the rotting corpse of Beatriz, passing into oblivion. She rots in the ground as she decays in his memory, and this loss is the one that he feels most acutely, more than the erasure of the whole glittering surface of the Aleph’s infinity. The last sad words of the story, then, are a testament to the superiority of love for a particular person over any degree of superficial knowledge.
Given that this is true of the Aleph, how much more must it be true of its pale technological shadows, which have reached their highest manifestation in the Internet? Despite sitting within our great watchtowers, the nations of the world laid before our feet for minute examination, many of us find ourselves empty. We can reach across oceans and transcend the limits of time through social media, explore the vast reaches of the world by proxy, and communicate without concern for space, and yet none of this has been able to replace the depth of personal connection or mitigate the painful knowledge of the world’s fleetingness. No matter how great one’s powers online or how much information one has access to, personal relationships will always take precedence, and as one’s life begins to slip away into death, it is this that shall be mourned most of all.
This should suggest something to us about the nature of knowledge itself. For many, and I often find myself in this category, knowledge is seen as the ultimate end. Great are the hordes who have given their lives for it, destroying their eyes in libraries or wearing out their shoes and pocket books in search of mentors. Yet for others, knowledge is always subservient to love and requires love to be truly realized. For Maximus the Confessor, for instance, it is love that leads one to knowledge of the divine as the Eros that pulls one into the embrace of the transcendent and burns to the roots of one’s character in a profound transformation:
When through love the mind is ravished by divine knowledge and in going outside of creatures has a perception of divine transcendence, then, according to the divine Isaiah, it comes in consternation to a realization of its own lowliness and says with conviction the words of the prophet: Woe is me for I am stricken at heart; because being a man having unclean lips, I dwell in the midst of a people with unclean lips and I have seen with my eyes the King, the Lord of hosts.1
It is precisely love, then, that the Aleph and its technological counterparts lack, and it is for this reason that the Aleph reveals only the cosmos, not God, not the transcendent. The whole world, so long as it is opaque to the divine, does nothing to satisfy the longings of the soul. Perhaps this is why the narrator, in the postscript, calls the Aleph he had seen “false,” and articulates a theory as to the true Aleph, which he believes to be located in a stone column in a Cairo mosque. Already he is dissatisfied and seeking more than the whole that has been revealed to him, for the cosmos itself is insufficient; only the God who is love is enough to satisfy the longings of the human soul. And it is precisely this love that the narrator feels in his adoration of Beatriz, and thus it is she, and not the Aleph, that he recalls as most significant in the last words of the story.
Borges himself likely felt this insufficiency in his own life, as we all must at one point or another. The book, after all, is very similar to the Internet in its capacity to transcend time and space and forms almost as fitting a comparison to the Aleph. Borges was a man obsessively dedicated to literature. He at times seemed incapable of differentiating between literature and the real world; at least, he views the world through a primarily literary lens. By all accounts, he was a man of profound erudition and had accomplished as much as any writer can hope to in this life. Yet for all that, interviews with Borges toward the end of his life do not reveal a man basking in the joy of knowledge and accomplishment but rather drip with melancholy and loneliness. He describes life as lacking any pleasure, declares dislike for his own work, and speaks of isolation.
It thus seems that for Borges, the vast expanses of knowledge that filled his mind, the reaches of the cosmos that he surveyed in his reading, his writing, and his erudition, were insufficient because they lacked the love that could transcend and complete them. So, too, is it with us in our age of vast and superficial knowledge, and indeed for every age and individual that feels the longing—common to all but so often buried—for that which transcends the world in all its limitedness and corruptibility. Even for the narrator of the Aleph, the love he feels for Beatriz is matched by the pain of her fading memory, for the broken world can provide only glimpses, small glimmerings of that which is greater than it and which it is called to contain.
Yet only in love is found the possibility of a foundation for one’s life and the satisfaction for one’s longing, for it is a reflection of the greater love that transcends creatures, as Maximus puts it. While the knowledge of the Aleph makes proud and shoddy poets and does little to move the souls of men, love inspires devotion, points upwards beyond the contingent to the eternal. Knowledge without love counts for little, for even “if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
Maximus the Confessor. Chapters on Love, I.12.