Monday, July 24, 2023

The Symbolic Dialectic, by Olavo de Carvalho

This book, for the poet Bruno Tolentino, is an essential part of Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophy, which can only be properly understood by taking into account the issues the author addresses with mastery in this collection of studies, skillfully cohered: symbolism and the mode of analogical reasoning, the relationship between poetry and philosophy, the mode of existence of literary genres and their species, metaphysics and the traditional worldview as the basis for artistic criticism – among other topics. Olavo applies and exemplifies the fundamentals he sets out in the first part of the book in a second part, composed of 3 film critiques and a theatrical one: he analyzes films acclaimed by critics, such as The Silence of the Lambs (winner of 5 Oscars), Sunrise (winner of 3 Oscars), and Central Station (nominated for 2 Oscars).

Author’s Foreword

A cultured man is not the one who returns from a disorganized and feverish day to a nocturnal orgy with Hegel or Bergson. Rather, it is the one for whom the daytime magic mirror, whether its floating images are bathed in sunlight or shipwrecked in shadows, offers a vision of the world that constantly becomes more and more his own. Philosophizing is not about reading philosophy; it is about feeling philosophy.

—John Cowper Powys

With this present volume, I begin to collect in thick-spined books the smaller writings that I have been leaving scattered throughout this world for two decades, in the form of booklets, course transcriptions, unpublished drafts, and discreetly or null circulated pamphlets.

Of unequal value, varying lengths, and diverse subjects, they have no other unity than that of the gaze which, as best it can, preserves its identity over time and questions everything around it, as it encounters things that cause wonder and give, according to Aristotle’s maxim, the occasion par excellence for the pursuit of knowledge.

I must explain that this gaze is essentially a philosophical gaze. Not believing in the pedantic clamor that makes a vain display of its own inability to define philosophy, but rather considering that there are valid reasons to see philosophy essentially as the pursuit of the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice versa,1 I have in this a sufficient criterion to distinguish what is philosophical from what is not, and I would be a foolish donkey if I could not apply it to my own writings.

Therefore, it is not philosophical, even when ingenious and sublime, the essay that delights in variety as such, where consciousness dissolves in the flow of impressions, “undulating and diverse,” and doesn’t even bother to notice when it contradicts itself. Nor is it philosophical the one that presupposes the current consensus in a given area of human knowledge and argues based on it, assuming that its reasons will be accepted by those who share it. Much less so the one that, based on public opinion, uses language as an instrument of mere persuasion, however clever and subtle it may be. But it is philosophical and cannot be anything else, the essay that, amid the variety of themes and problems, seeks the opportunity to probe the founding principles of all certainty, like someone who systematically returns to the center from a thousand and one points on a circumference, even if chosen by chance. It is philosophical not by merit or lack thereof but by the nature of things, with the inexorable inevitability of a primary evidence or a tautology.

If you want to know, it was precisely my aversion to arbitrariness and aimless fashion that made me seek teaching far away from the Brazilian university. And when today someone, having read several of my writings or attended my courses, suddenly becomes aware of the unity of intentions that gives shape and meaning to everything I do and write—and in the same act apprehends the unity and meaning of their own pursuit of knowledge—at that moment, I thank Providence for preserving me from dispersion and university worldliness so that I would have the supreme joy of a teacher, which is to be able to open to his students a horizon much greater than the circumference of a dish of lentils.

The search for coherence, however, is only one aspect of philosophy. The other is the openness to the limitless horizon of experience, with all its variety and often irreducible confusion. It is accurate to characterize philosophy—complementing the above definition—as the permanent tension between experience and reason. But this tension is itself an experience, and there are more people willing to flee from it than to accept with an open heart the responsibilities it implies. Modernity as a whole, in a way, is an escape, as it begins by deactivating the tension by crystallizing its two poles into separate and self-contained “styles of thinking”—rationalism and empiricism—and inevitably ends up sacrificing human intelligence on the altar of a diminutive conception of both reason and experience, reducing the former to the mechanical operation of syllogistic technique and the latter to a conventional cut dictated by the “scientific method.”

The tension is permanent, but its poles shift places. Initially, the unity is purely internal, it is the potential unity of a nascent self that defends itself as best it can from external confusion. Gradually, it notices that it cannot persist without growing, that is, without absorbing, digesting, and transfiguring into rational expression what threatens it. There comes a point where the self itself becomes the focus of confusion, while the external world, with its demands and disciplines, helps it to rearticulate. Then the picture is reversed again, and again, until the periodic inversions are accepted as the very dialectics of life. This process is fundamentally identical in all human beings: the specific difference of the philosopher is that he yearns to consciously experience all the steps, not as a memoirist (although he cannot help being one in his own way), but as a witness to the universality of this experience.

Therefore, these are essays on philosophy. I only ask that in this expression, the term “essay” is not understood merely as a vague designation of a literary genre, but in the strict sense of a sketch and an attempt. Each of the works gathered here points and moves, in fact, towards certain principles' evidence, which, when organized and hierarchized, compose a philosophy. However, its full expression will not be found in this volume, for the simple reason that it is a philosophy in the making and that it could not be otherwise, given that its author is a man of sixty years—precisely the age when, after decades of essays and attempts, a philosopher begins to penetrate into the territory that will be definitively his own, if he lives to occupy it, by the grace of God.

Indeed, there is no precocity in philosophy as there is in poetry, music, physics, or religion. Every so-called young philosophical genius ends up refuting his youthful ideas, that is if he does not blow his brains out at twenty-one, like Otto Weininger. From Plato’s Republic to Husserl’s Krisis, all the masterpieces of philosophy are products of maturity and old age.

Philosophy is reflection, and there is no worthwhile reflection without the experience that precedes it. As Hegel aptly put it, the bird of philosophy only takes flight at twilight—a principle that applies to both individuals and civilizations.

For this reason, the descent into old age, which for most mortals is nothing more than the somber anticipation of decay after a triumphant climb, announces itself to the philosopher as the final journey towards the promised land after a life of toil and suffering, like entering a dome of light at the end of decades of struggle against darkness.

From where I stand, at the summit of more than half a century of existence, I can see, in a single intuitive glance, the entire horizon of evidence I have been seeking since my youth. But seeing them does not mean possessing them yet, since, by a curious fate inherent in the constitution of the human mind, the more intuitive and evident the content of knowledge is, the more it requires, to be expressed, the meticulous distinctions of dialectics and logic. A fate that, being unknown to those who still suffer from the dualism of thinking and perceiving, makes it impossible for them to understand philosophy as a symbolic form and as a masterful architectural art that, having as raw and almost tangible matter not words or sounds and colors, but rather what for the masses is the most abstract, that is, the pure eidetic schema of discourse, has as its inner form and ultimate goal that which, being supremely evident and luminous, is beyond all discourse.

It is therefore natural that the philosopher, before venturing to give his ideas the formal and systematic expression in which they will acquire their definitive identity, settles his accounts with the early stages of his life and work, like a painter who revisits and organizes his sketches before starting the painting.

This is the sense of the collection of Estudos reunidos that this volume inaugurates. For a writer, a critic, an essayist, a volume of this kind is the crowning achievement of a lifetime. Publishing it at sixty would be premature retirement. For the philosopher, it is only the time to make the final assessment of the essays to start the show.

All my work published to this moment, which this collection concludes, should therefore be seen as a long preface to História essencial da filosofia, to Breve tratado de metafísica dogmática, to Filosofia política, and other presentations that will follow, some of which are halfway to their final form, others dispersed and formless in class notes, others just in a nutshell.

Praying to God to give me the strength to complete the task undertaken, I present in this collection the reckoning of the early stages, not as one who contemplates the built house victorious, but as one who, seeing the materials gathered and organized—piles of bricks, mounds of sand, rows of boards—rolls up his sleeves to start the construction. Gathered and organized, it must be understood, only with regard to the validity of the ideas, for there was no concern for chronology or ordering of themes in the arrangement of these writings. I even preferred to select for this first volume some of the most recent ones, for mere convenience, because they seemed to me less in need of revisions and additions, and I did not hesitate to place them alongside a work like “A dialética simbólica,” from 1983, because in it, I believe to have prematurely achieved an expression that suits my current demands; and if his name appears on the cover, it signals the special joy I felt in writing it and even more so in subscribing to it now.2

As I present this volume to the public, I thank from the bottom of my heart all those who helped me preserve these texts, especially Meri Angélica Harakava, Stella Caymmi, Ana Maria Santos Peixoto, Maria Elisa Ortenblad, Fernando Carneiro, Henriete Fonseca, Marcelo Albuquerque, Denny Marquesani, Eduy César Ferro, Luciane Amato, Guilherme Almeida, Roseli Podbevsek, and my wife and accomplice, Roxane. If I have forgotten anyone, it was unintentional.

Richmond, VA, March 25, 2007.

Part 1 – Theoretical Studies

I. The Symbolic Dialectic and Other Studies

1. The Symbolic Dialectic

I swear by the rosy morning twilight;
by the night and all that it envelopes;
and by the full moon:
you shall pass from plane to plane.
(The Holy Quran: IV, 16-19)

Seen from Earth, the Sun and the Moon have the same apparent diameter: half a degree of arc. However, all their other sensible qualities – color, temperature, etc. – are symmetrically opposite. This makes them the emblem par excellence of all maximum and irreducible oppositions, modeled by the scheme of two divergent and equidistant points from a central third point: on the occasion of the full Moon, the setting Moon and the rising Sun, or the rising Moon while the Sun sets, form the perfect image of the balance of opposites, with the Earth in the middle as the faithful balance.

This image naturally comes to mind when we want to evoke the idea of balance, in relation to, let’s say, the active and the passive, the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark, or everything that Chinese culture summarized under the notions of yang and yin.

Being easy to remember and possessing great evocative and mnemonic power,3 it was natural that, in our time, the media appropriated it, using it as a tool to fix in the consumer’s imagination the message of new diets, fitness programs, and other ideological gadgets that entered the market through hippie naturism and pseudo-oriental doctrines. The abuse of the luni-solar emblem came along with the vulgarization of yin and yang.

Despite the vulgarization, the image and the notion it evokes are perfectly suitable for the reality they intend to express; the law of mutual compensation of opposites is not pure fantasy but a relationship that prevails in many planes and sectors of experience, and can be observed and abstracted from nature, for example, in the case of communicating vessels or acid-base balance. Within its limits, it is a perfectly valid explanatory or at least descriptive principle that works for certain groups of phenomena.

However, as soon as we move from the abstract concept of balance to the attempt to balance something real – for example, when we learn to ride a bicycle –, we find that our image of perfect symmetry breaks upon the impact of successive disillusionments: in fact, there is no perfectly static balance anywhere in the sensible world. Once the moment of balance is achieved, the central point slides, the whole escapes from fleeting symmetry, and falls; and we return to the oscillation of opposites, the variant undulation that does not form a fixed figure. Thus, in lived experience, in the succession of real moments, the point of balance is not really a point, but a line; and it is not even a straight line, but sinuous, swaying on the sides of a merely ideal axis, compensating the tensions from here and there, and composing with the play of imbalance of the parts, the pattern of the unstable balance of the whole – a pattern more imaginatively sensed than sensibly perceived.

In homeopathy, one often reasons in this way. An apparently alarming symptom – fevers, bleedings, suppurations – undoubtedly manifests an imbalance, but the clinician may refrain from medicating it if he believes that this partial imbalance of certain functions will contribute to restoring the balance of the whole organism. Conversely, a medicine that breaks a state of superficial balance can also be prescribed to induce, from the depths of organic roots, the ascensional formation of a new and more lasting state of balance.

Let’s agree that this reasoning is much more subtle and comprehensive than the previous one. It allows for a deeper understanding of phenomena. For example, if our pseudo-“oriental” “naturalists” were to study a little of the Hahnemannian method, they would eventually realize – better late than never – that there are no foods that are inherently yin or yang, but only foods that, in a given condition, temporarily assume, for a specific organism, the roles of yin or yang, roles that can be reversed with the further evolution of the situation. In fact, the Chinese tradition categorically affirms that the yin-yang dualism is “the extreme limit of the cosmos”; thus, it only truly exists on the plane of the total cosmos, and that individual entities are not only composed of different dosages of these two principles but that this dosage becomes progressively more complex as we descend from the universal plane to the most particular and sensitive planes. Thus, to evaluate whether any entity – let’s say, a turnip – is yin or yang, one would have to consider a practically infinite number of variables, including, obviously, the moment and the place, that is, the astrological factors involved in the case; which, all in all, shows the futility of such an endeavor. Such subtleties never escaped the Chinese. It is only the foolish rudeness of our “mass culture” that imagines it can squeeze cosmological concepts into dietary tables through shallow, linear, and ultimately entirely fictitious correspondences.

But, returning to the previous paragraph, what is the difference between the two reasoning processes we just described? In the first one, the two terms were statically opposed by equidistance from a center. However, if we move from the idea of static balance to that of dynamic balance, that is, from abstract concept to concrete experience, and thus realize that balance is not only made of symmetry and equidistance but also of interaction, conflict, and reciprocity between the two poles, then they are no longer opposites but complementaries. They are no longer just the extremities of a scale, but the matrices of a harmony, as indispensable and complementary to each other as sperm and ovum, bow and string, sound vibration and the vibratility of the eardrum. They no longer speak to us solely through their fixed equidistance, so to speak, crystallized in the sky, but through their coexistence, simultaneously hostile and loving, pregnant with tensions and latent possibilities.

Digging deeper into the difference, we find that, by changing the point of view, we introduce the variable time, or more simply, succession. Roughly, we can say that the first reasoning is a logical-analytical reasoning – or of identity and difference – and the second is a dialectical reasoning (in the Hegelian sense and not the Aristotelian). Those who consider themselves Hegelians have always accused the logic of identity of being purely static, aiming at formal abstractions rather than concrete things, immersed in the flow of time, subject to incessant transformations. Dialectical reasoning aims to grasp the movement, so to speak, of real transformations in the world of phenomena. The truth, according to this method, is not in the fixed concept of isolated entities but in the logical-temporal process that simultaneously reveals and constitutes them. This is the meaning of Hegel’s famous formula: “Wesen ist was gewesen ist” – “Essence [of an entity] is what [that entity] has become.” Or, in other terms: being is becoming.

In astrology, the symbol that evokes this second approach is that of the lunar cycle. It projects onto the celestial canvas the spectacle of permanence in change, of being that reveals and constitutes itself in becoming. In fact, it is the very mutations of the lunar face that eventually show man the unity of the source of light that, through the play of reciprocal and successive positions, creates this impression of change and variety: the Sun. Now, the Sun cannot be looked at directly. In Chesterton’s precious formula, “the one created thing in the light of which we look at everything is the one thing we cannot look at.” The Sun is thus an invisible luminosity. The Moon, on the other hand, can be seen with its clear profile outlined in the sky, but, to compensate, this profile is not constant. Thus, each of the apparent luminaries has something elusive, not to say ambiguous: one escapes direct sight because of its unbearable brightness, the other, due to its changing form, evades the static representation that preludes, in the sphere of the imaginary, what in the realm of reasoning will be conceptual crystallization. Now, the mutation of the lunar appearance clearly goes through three phases, or faces (the fourth face, the new Moon, is invisible): in the first, the Moon seems to grow as a source of progressively independent light. There it reaches a fullness: the full equivalence of two luminous circles of half a degree of arc appears in the sky. If the mutation were to stop at this point, we would say: there are two sources of light in the sky. But the moment of fullness already announces decline, already contains the germ of its suppression; and the waning comes, and finally, the Moon disappears: the Sun, which had remained constant under its luminous cover throughout this time, was revealed – to the observing intellect: was constituted – as the real single source of light, expressed and temporally unfolded by the ternary compass of its reflective surface, the Moon.

In spiritual symbolism,4 the Sun represents understanding, truth, and the Moon represents the mind, thought, the subjective image of truth: in dialectic, a latent truth is constituted in the human spirit by the process of becoming that reveals it, that veri-fies it.5

If the balance of the Sun and the Moon on the horizon, statically contemplated on the occasion of the full Moon, represented the static balance of opposites, and therefore the logic of identity and difference, the complete lunar cycle, contemplated in its temporal succession, prints in the sky the ternary movement of dialectical thought and the “ever-flowing” of natural things.

Dialectic reasoning is closely related to reasoning of cause and effect, to the idea of continuity of the same latent cause beneath the procession of effects, and also to the form of pure narration. Thus, the lunar cycle can represent either the dialectical approach or the causal-narrative approach indifferently. The ultimate sense of all historicism, in the broad sense of the word, is, in fact, to suppress the difference between logical order and narrative order.

If the reasoning of identity and difference6 is simple, direct, and molded in the observation of correspondences immediately presented to the senses or intelligence, the dialectical reasoning demands much more complex operations, such as the observation of an entire cycle of transformations.

Thus, there has been a transition from one plane to another, an upward movement: when we pass from static opposition to dynamic complementarity, from static reasoning to dialectical reasoning, we change our observation point, and a new system of relationships becomes evident in the spectacle of things. We feel that we have come closer to “effective reality,” abandoning a merely formal schema and freeing ourselves from subjective confinement. We seem to have found a solution to the opposition initially posed: by introducing the variable “time,” opposition has been resolved into complementation.

However, upon careful examination, we find that dialectic has only solved one problem at the expense of creating another: by resolving the opposition between the Sun and the Moon, it has installed in its place the opposition between the static and the dynamic. While it is true that many static oppositions can be resolved through dynamic reasoning, it is no less true that none of them can be initially established except by the static and abstract formulation of the concepts of their elements. How could we dialectically “fluidify” the opposition between the Sun and the Moon if we did not know what the Sun and the Moon are, that is, if the concepts of these two celestial bodies were not fixed? From now on, we are condemned to a radical duality, which separates thought and reality with an iron screen: our concepts will always be static, reality will always be dynamic. Dialectic leads to the dualism of Bergson7 and Bachelard.8 The synthesis decomposes into melancholic antinomy.

To make matters worse, dialectic itself, to take action, has to introduce new concepts, which will also be static, including the concept of dialectic itself. These concepts can then be dialecticized in turn, and so on endlessly. But, as Heraclitus, the grandfather of dialectic, said, “we never step into the same river twice,” we may wonder if this statement by Heraclitus has the same meaning twice.

Dialectic is thus faced with a tragic dilemma: to choose an endless discourse – which, having no limits, ceases to have any identifiable content, as noted by the neopositivist critics of Hegel9 – or to arbitrarily and therefore irrationally determine an arbitrary endpoint for the dialectical process. Hegel, as is well known, made himself the endpoint of the history of philosophy, and philosophy continued to exist after him.

Therefore, it is urgent to move beyond dialectic, to climb one more step, to rise to a broader and more comprehensive perspective. And once again, it will be the celestial model that will come to our aid, following Plato’s warning that without orienting ourselves by the lines of divine intelligence crystallized in the planetary cycles, our thoughts continue to wander from error to error.

It happens that the two poles of our initial opposition can only be called contraries – or, subsequently, complementaries – when viewed in the same plane, that is, when measured by the same standard, resulting in equal quantities.10 In the transition from static to dynamic reasoning, something certainly changed – the mode of representation – but something remained the same: the observer’s point of view;11 in both cases, we assumed that the observer was stationed on Earth; first, contemplating the moment of balance between the Sun and the Moon on the horizon; then, following the cycle of transformations during a lunar month; but always from the same location.

All oppositions – and, therefore, all complementarities – are based on some common trait, which is inversely polarized in one element and in the other. Oppositions are accidental differences resulting from a background of essential identity; complementarity consists only in reconstituting this background of essential identity, which a moment of the process had veiled, and which the temporal observation of the complete process unveils again, just as the Sun and the Moon can obscure each other during an eclipse and then reveal themselves as they really are. This play that moves from identity to difference and back to identity can only unfold before a static observer firmly stationed in their observation post.

Now, humans cannot normally leave their observation post; they cannot physically transport themselves outside of the Earth. They can only travel mentally; but, left to itself, the imagination wanders among celestial spaces and falls into formless fantasy. The antidote to this danger is astronomy: through accurate measurement, humans restore the true figure of the heavens in their representation, and they already have the support of a new intellectual model – based, according to Plato, on divine intelligence – to seek a point of view that allows them to go beyond common dialectics, penetrating into what we could call symbolic dialectics.

If, in common dialectics,12 we introduced the factor “time,” here we will use the element “space,” thus completing the model on which our representations and the sensitive models of their respective forms of reasoning are based. We can say that the dialectical point of view corresponds to a merely “agricultural” observation of the heavens: all it captures is the idea of transformation and cycle. The symbolic dialectic will now start from a properly astronomical understanding and delve into the spatial interweaving of various points of view and the various cycles they unveil.

Now, if we abandon the terrestrial point of view and consider the solar system as a whole,13 that is, the larger framework of references in which the various elements come into play and differentiate, we find that, in reality, the Moon is not opposed to the Sun, as in the static identity reasoning, nor coordinated with it, as in dialectical reasoning, but rather subordinated. In fact, it is even doubly subordinated, being the satellite of a satellite. The Earth is to the Sun as the Moon is to the Earth. Thus, we form a proportion, and here, for the first time, we achieve a fully legitimate rational approach, since “reason,” ratio, originally means nothing more than proportion.14 It is the proportion between our representations and experience, and between reasoning and representations, that ensures the rationality of our thoughts and, ultimately, the truth of our ideas.

Having reached this point, immediately the initial opposition and the complementarity that followed reveal themselves as partial aspects – hence insufficient – of a set of proportions that eventually merge into the unitary principle that constitutes them. Because all proportions, as we will see later, are variations of equality, just as the interactions between the angles and positions of the various planets with each other are absorbed and resolved into the positioning of all around their central axis, which is the Sun.

This third modality is called the reasoning of analogy.15 There are many current misconceptions about what analogical reasoning actually is. For example, many authors believe it to be the mere observation of similarity of forms.16 Others assume it to be a primitive and vaguely “poetic” form of assimilating reality, radically distinguished from rational and logical apprehension.17 Analogy is confused with similitude, metaphor, allegory, and many other things, and its cognitive value is mistakenly underestimated. Few modern philosophers demonstrate a mastery of analogical reasoning as practiced by the ancient and medieval thinkers; it seems that the majority does not quite understand what it consists of.

If academic philosophers make mistakes in this regard, their traditional adversaries, astrologers, and occultists, make no fewer. They do so, however, with the opposite intention, emphasizing the superiority of analogical reasoning. In fact, they use and abuse a famous “law of analogy,” called upon to legitimize their art, and whose function is to unite, in synchronous pulsation, the whole and the part, the universe and the individual, the distant and the close, everything that fits into the classic formula of the micro and the macro contained in the Tabula smaragdina attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.18

However, it is not the place here to criticize astrologers; the fact is that they interpret this “law” in a flat, shallow, linear manner, as if there were not merely an analogy but an identity between the micro and the macro; for example, when reading horoscopes, the correspondences they see between celestial configurations and events in individual human life are practically direct, without the modulations and mediations that common sense requires, and without the inversions of meaning that the very rule of analogical reasoning, when properly understood, demands. For instance, having established a symbolic connection between Saturn and fatherhood, and between the Moon and motherhood, they will directly interpret an “inharmonious” angle19 between Saturn and the Moon in the natal chart as an indication of a conflict between the consultant’s mother and father. This grossly mechanical form of reasoning was aptly caricatured in a “syllogism” invented by the Spanish astrologer Rodolfo Hinostroza:

"Saturn = stone. Sagittarius = liver. Therefore, Saturn in Sagittarius = stone in the liver. Or, if you prefer, stoning in the liver."20

Likewise, they establish direct correspondences between Libra, as a symbol of cosmic balance, and common justice in our courts, between Taurus and bovine laziness, and many others in the same vein and of the same value. However, astrology is a cosmological symbolism, not psychological: the plane where its phenomena unfold, the stage where its drama is played out, is the total cosmos, not just the individual’s mind, let alone the mental theater of middle-class women who are the typical clients of astrologers. Between these two planes, separated by many “worlds,” there must necessarily be many transitions and attenuations; I will explain this later. What matters to note now is that analogical reasoning is a subtle tool, one of precision: it cannot withstand being flattened and compressed, merging the macro into the micro.

What does analogy actually mean? Firstly, any Greek dictionary will indicate, under the entry αναλωγος, analogos, the sense of “proportionality,” in the sense of the formula

a/b = x/y

or in the sense of the harmonies between the different lengths of strings on a musical instrument and the sounds they respectively emit when vibrated. Proportions, as it is obvious, consist precisely in the ratio of differences between different values. Therefore, if there are no differences, there is no analogy; there is simply identity, in the sense of the formula

1/1 = 1/1

or, to sum up, 1 = 1. This should reveal from the outset that, in the symbolism of spiritual traditions, unlike what happens in today’s consultative astrology, any astral symbol – planet or sign, angle or house – could never have the same meaning when considered in different planes of reality, for example, in the plane of the total cosmos, that of historical cycles, and that of individual psychology. Secondly, the prefix ανα, ana, which forms this word, signifies an ascensional movement:

μελανες ανα βοτρυες ησαν

Mélanes aná botrües esan:

“Above, there were black grape clusters”

(Iliad, 18:562)

It is translated as “on,” “above,” “upstream,” “upward,” as in anagogê, αναγωγη, “elevation,” “action of elevating or snatching upwards,” or as in anábasis, anaforá, etc.

The term “analogy,” therefore, suggests that it is a relationship in an ascending sense. Or, more accurately: the two objects connected by a relationship of analogy are linked from above: it is through their higher aspects that beings can be “in analogy.” An analogy is all the more evident the further we move away from sensory particularity to consider beings under the aspect of their universality. Correlatively, this relationship fades away the more we look at beings from their lower aspects, from their empirical phenomenality, precisely the plane where, despite their lofty claims, astrologers and occultists operate.

What establishes an analogy between two entities, therefore, are not the similarities they present on the same plane, but the fact that they are connected to the same principle,21 each representing symbolically its own way and level of being, and containing in itself both, is necessarily superior to both. It is at this level of universality that the celestial bond of analogy is celebrated, connecting in a chain of symbols gold to honey, honey to the lion, the lion to the king, the king to the Sun, the Sun to the angel, and the angel to the Logos. Viewed from above, from the principle that constitutes them, they reveal the proportionality between the symbolic functions they perform for the manifestation of that principle, each at the cosmological level to which it corresponds, and this proportionality constitutes the analogy. Viewed from below, from empirical phenomenality, they disintegrate into the multiplicity of differences. Thus, analogy is simultaneously evident and ungraspable; obvious to some, inconceivable to others, depending on the unity or fragmentation of their respective worldviews.

Therefore, we use analogies to ascend from sensory perception to the apprehension of spiritual essence, to move from the visible to the invisible, or, in the terms of Hugo de São Vítor,22 to move from nature to grace: nature, the sensible world, “signifies” the invisible; spiritual grace “exhibits” it, at the top of the ladder. The ladder of analogies – evoked, for example, in Jacob’s ladder, in the steps of Paradise in Dante, and in all hierarchies of spiritual knowledge – is a means of access to the principle, and on the other hand, it collapses if this principle is removed from the top where it hangs.

Being a vertical and ascensional bond, analogy differs from simple relations of similarity – complementarity, contiguity, contrast, etc. – that relate, join, separate, and order entities on the same horizontal plane. This distinction, however elementary it may be, easily escapes the modern observer, as even a discerning historian like Michel Foucault is mistaken in classifying analogy as one of the forms of similarity in medieval science. In reality, the difference in planes between these two relationships does not allow them to be seen as species of the same genus, just as hierarchical classifications in general differ from typological classifications: the distinction between captain, major, and colonel is not of the same kind as the difference between infantry, artillery, and cavalry.23 And even less could analogy be subjected to similarity, as species to genus, just as one could not say that the classification of military ranks is a species from which the division of the three arms constitutes the genus.

This should be enough to demonstrate that certain resemblances that astrologers point out between planets (or planetary myths) and entities and events in the terrestrial world – such as, for example, the fact that Mars and blood are both red – are not analogies because they do not refer to the principle that constitutes these two entities and that is the common reason for their similarities and differences. These are mere similarities discerned on the same plane (in this case, that of chromatic sensory qualities). And as, in the descending sense, the relationship of proportionality progressively dissolves into the multiplicity of differences, these mere similarities may be quite insignificant and even entirely fortuitous; and no serious knowledge could be obtained by collecting curious coincidences.

In the symbolic scheme we are studying, the transition from the particular to the universal is symbolized by the transition from the geocentric viewpoint to the heliocentric viewpoint. The latter, due to its greater scope, allows us to grasp relationships – analogies – that the particularism of the terrestrial view obscured. Summarizing the phases traveled, we go through: 1st phase. Viewpoint: momentary sensory appearance. Reasoning: identities and differences. 2nd phase. Viewpoint: temporal and cyclical. Reasoning: causal or dialectical. 3rd phase. Viewpoint: space-temporal, comprehensive, universalizing, ascensional. Reasoning: analogy.

On the other hand, if analogies lead to knowledge of the principle, it is because this knowledge already resided in us in a virtual way. This latent presence, this invisible guide that leads us with a sure hand through the “straight path” of analogies in the forest of similarities, is symbolized by Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard in the three stages of the poet’s ascent in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Now, in general, we only know the universal principles in their abstract formulas, so we often find ourselves divided between a universal truth detached from concrete experience and a concrete experience devoid of truth and meaning, reduced to the most blind and tedious empiricism. The climb of analogies aims precisely to bridge this gap, leading, as far as possible, to a lived and concrete knowledge of the universal. Through analogy and symbolism, as well as through the many spiritual arts, sciences, and techniques that aim to crystallize and condense this symbolism in subjective experience, the goal is precisely to transform and expand the individual psyche so that it itself reaches a universal dimension, in the image of the Universal Man,24 which is the compendium and model of the entire cosmos.

In numerical symbolism, all proportions are, ultimately, forms and variations of identity. Identity is a single, simple, and abstract formula, 1 = 1, which synthetically contains all the proportions of the universe, that is, all the “dosages” that compose things and beings. By knowing the principle of identity, we know, in a sense, the reason of all reasons; it is universal knowledge, but still in a virtual and abstract mode, like a seed that potentially contains an entire forest. The ascent of analogies gives living concretion to this principle, summarizing, so to speak, in an abbreviated manner, the entire range of possibilities contained in the principle of identity, and at the top of the ladder, we rediscover this principle, no longer as an abstract formula but as full reality, as the sense of truth and truth of sense, as the unity of truth and sense. It is only in this way that we understand what scholasticism called concrete universal, a synthesis of logical universality and existential fullness.25

This reunion, this re-connection, resonates as the full realization of the meaning of life. It is the reunification of man with himself, preliminary to the reunion with God. In the philosophy of Hugo de São Vítor,26 it is the reunion of the outer, or carnal, man with the inner, or spiritual, man. Hugo, following a tradition but translating it with genius and originality, first distinguishes four levels in man: in the corporeal part, sensus (senses) and imaginatio (imagination); in the spiritual part, ratio (reason) and intelligentia (intelligence). Then he asks: is there not an intermediate level, a link between spirit and body? To this intermediate level, Hugo gives the name affectio imaginaria, and his disciple Richard of St. Victor calls it imaginatio mediatrix; “imaginary affection” and “mediating imagination.” It is in this intermediate level that the knowledge of analogies and symbolism, in general, takes place, and it is there that the reunion of universal truth with and in concrete experience occurs. The ontological counterpart of this psychological level is the so-called mundus imaginalis, the world of imaginal forms, which should not be confused with the imaginary (Hugo attributes the imaginary to the corporeal part) and which constitute the lost link between the world of the senses and universal concepts; it is there that the reunification of man with himself is celebrated, and it is there that we must turn our attention if we want to break the divorce of soul/spirit that four centuries of Cartesianism have accustomed us to. If the reasoning of analogy is so incomprehensible to modern man, it is because he has lost sight of this intermediate world, becoming accustomed to understanding as “abstraction” everything that escapes the realm of the senses. But this intermediate world is not only the world of symbols, but also of imaginal entities symbolized by them, for one could not conceive a cognitive faculty that did not have its objective counterpart, its own and independent object of knowledge. And it is in the imaginal world that we find again the angels and all the characters of biblical and mythological narratives, as forms of reality that are not reduced to our subjective psyche or to a merely external objectivity.27

Without the climb through the imaginal world, without symbolic dialectics, the human mind will always be divided between empirical particulars and abstract universals, unable to rise to the knowledge of the infinite unity, which, upon careful examination, is the only concrete reality from which everything else is an aspect or a fragment obtained only through abstraction. This climb coincides, in large part, with that described by F. W. Schelling, in which sense (knowledge of particulars in indefinite number, without unity) and understanding (knowledge of abstract unity) ascend to reason (knowledge of concrete unity and infinitude) through imagination. At the top, the affirmation of identity is always found:28

The affirmation of infinite unity is not accidental to reason; it is its total essence itself, which also expresses itself in that law that is accepted as the only one that includes an unconditional affirmation: the law of identity (A = A).

Until now, you have considered this law only as formal and subjective, and you have only recognized in it the repetition of your own thought. But it has nothing to do with your thought; it is an infinite universal law, which asserts from the universe that there is nothing in it that is purely predicative or purely predicated, but that there is eternally and everywhere only one thing that affirms itself and is affirmed by itself, that manifests itself and is manifested by itself; in short, that nothing is truly unless it is absolute and divine.

Consider this law in itself, know its content, and you will have contemplated God.

The climb ends there. At the top, we find again the superior principle that organizes the various levels of an analogical sequence, and it seems that there is nothing else to know in this domain. We may have the illusion of having once and for all reached the supreme truth.

However, in practice, the closer we get to a universal principle, the further behind and far away the concrete realities whose explanation we sought become. And near the top, we sometimes seem to have lost sight of the purpose of the journey. The moment of reunion passes, and all that remains in our hands is the abstract and lifeless statement of a logical principle, which is the melancholic remembrance of a lost universality. Therefore, it is necessary to descend again from the principle to its particular manifestations, and then climb again, and so on. So the alternation of yes/no, truth/error, which is the beginning of our investigation, is finally replaced, in a turn of ninety degrees, by the alternation high-low, universal-particular. We move from horizontal oscillation to vertical. And it is precisely the awakening of the ability to constantly perform the ascent and descent that constitutes the objective of all spiritual education, without which the perspective offered to us by symbolic dialectics becomes only a mirage. We thus understand how vain and childish any philosophy teaching that remains at the level of mere discussion and does not include a discipline of the soul is. The fact that philosophy has descended from the condition of inner asceticism to that of mere confrontation of doctrines in an environment of worldly gossip is a malady from which the West, perhaps, will never recover.

2. Emotion and Reflection29

Emotion recollected in tranquillity is certainly not a definition of poetry or art in general, but it is the statement of one of the basic requirements for its exercise. It does not express its essence but a condition of its existence. It is not a proposition of aesthetic theory but of the psychology of art.

However, the word “art” in this case must be understood in a broader sense than in the usual academic division of disciplines. It must also extend to the “humanities,” and in such a way that they also encompass “philosophy” and even, to some extent, the so-called “human sciences,” without excluding altogether, from certain aspects, the (improperly called) “natural” and “exact” sciences. It must encompass, to a certain extent, the entire realm of human intellectual creations, to the extent that these cannot emerge from nothing without some spiritually emotional experience giving initial impetus to the inner creativity of the artist, philosopher, or scientist, and they cannot find the conditions for their full formal manifestation without the subsequent retreat that recalls this experience and elaborates it in the tranquility of reflection.

“Reflection” here does not necessarily mean internal dialectics, rational critique of the experienced life; in a more elastic, but not imprecise sense, it designates the simple inner, conscious, and deliberate return to experience, whether to reproduce it with greater accuracy, to complete it, or to alter it. What distinguishes the reflective moment from direct interior experience is the conscious intention to fix it, be it in an image, in musical notes, or in words, whether those words are, in addition, allusive symbols or rigorous terms that grasp it in the delimitation of its essential concept. Now, this intention goes precisely in the opposite direction of the living flow of experience; it is a spiritual and intentional return to that which, in a real and material sense, never returns.

For this reason, it has always seemed to me foolish and mere posturing the pretension of artists who claim to capture the living experience and consider themselves wiser for it, almost like prophets or angels, compared to the philosopher or scientist who grasps from it only the “dry” and “dead” scheme of a “concept,” a contemptible thing. For the “living experience,” if it does not come in the form of a concept, does not appear in meter or musical notes either, but is transformed into them by the art or artifice of the artist, who, in doing so, distances himself from it, moving towards the spirit, just as the philosopher or scientist does, distinguishing themselves only by the different genre of schematization or formalization they employ.

But notice that, in the lines above, I did not refer to direct and raw experience, but rather to an already spiritualized and valued experience. No one who knows the subject will deny that the experience of the world of a true artist, philosopher, or man endowed with inner richness and depth differs significantly from that of the ordinary person. While in the latter, everything is resolved in an empirical equation whose terms are pleasure and pain, advantage and disadvantage, in the exalted soul, experience, however small, always indicates something that goes far beyond experience; the particular is a sign of the universal, and experience, however direct and raw it may appear at the moment it happens, already brings in the background the element of contemplative withdrawal that ennobles and values it with a meaning that transcends immediate empiricism, due to the greater diameter of the inner space where it takes place: “Mon cœur profond ressemble à ces voûtes d’église, où le moindre bruit s’enfle en une immense voix” (“My deep heart is like those church vaults, where the slightest sound swells into an immense voice”).

Now, the profound and sensitive man to whom I refer, if he obtains a richer harvest of interior repercussions from the experience, it is not because he deliberately enters it with the intention of making it the material for paintings, poems, or philosophical systems, but simply because he already is who he is, a poet or philosopher with a poet’s soul, already formed by the long series of determinations that may come from an ancestral destiny, and consolidated in his vocation by the succession of experiences and purifications that have prepared, precisely, the inner stage where this particular experience comes to penetrate at a given moment.

In an era when literature and philosophy have become names of professions, whose legal exercise is accessed through public examination and the state’s gracious concession, under the protective care of class unions, it is not too much to remember that the true poet and the true philosopher are not distinguished from other human beings merely by their greater capacity to elaborate, respectively, contents of consciousness in rhymes and syllogisms, which are as banal in their nature as those of a civilian. On the contrary, they stand out from the latter because they perceive as real and immediate certain subtle relations that appear, or would appear if spoken of, far too distant, abstract, or entirely fanciful to him.

But even this differently differentiated spiritual experience does not come in the form of a book, a painting, or a symphony. It must be transposed through subsequent work of remembrance, selection, ordering, etc., which can ultimately transform it into something very different and much richer or poorer than it was at the moment it occurred. Hence the term “work of art,” which means: the fruit of human labor, never a gratuitous gift of nature.

Moreover, there is no specific difference between the spiritual experience of the poet, the musician, the philosopher, or even the true scientist. In all these cases, it is a matter of perceiving, behind the amalgam of immediate data, the hint of a meaningful form, as if life itself were speaking.30 The difference lies in the various codes that subsequently serve as guides and patterns for the reflective elaboration of the residue of experience preserved in memory.

Each of these codes is constituted by a set of requirements consolidated by a long tradition of work, requirements that determine and select the different conditions of communicability and credibility of the “contents” of experience. Some of these requirements may be entirely conventional, others may result from a progressive purification of artistic, scientific, or philosophical consensus; others may be based on common sense or universally accepted principles. It matters little: the fact is that, when transforming personal experience into a communicable form, the creative subject must take them into account.

The very prototype of the inner experience to which I refer is that mentioned by Aristotle: "Those who go through an initiation are not there to apprehend something with their understanding, but to undergo an inner experience and be placed in a certain disposition…"31

It is evident that this inner experience cannot be reduced, on the one hand, to the banal sensory experience32 of the natural and civilized man, nor, on the other hand, inflated until it becomes indistinguishable from the finished products of subsequent elaboration. It is precisely halfway between raw experience and consciously created form. It is the indispensable precondition for all artistic, scientific, or philosophical creation, preceding and indifferent to these differentiations of discipline names.

That is precisely why, in judging the creations of intelligence, one can take into account not only their more or less perfect elaboration but also the breadth, coherence, and quality of the inner experience that serves as their foundation. This experience constitutes the “world” of the philosopher, the artist, the scientist, a world that, considered in itself and independently of the subsequent reflective effort that gives it shape and makes it participable by other human beings, can be richer or less rich, more integrated or less integrated, more profound and comprehensive, or less.

Few inner universes are as well elaborated and formalized as those of Wittgenstein, Maurice Ravel, Mondrian, Paul Valéry, or Stephen Hawking; but they cannot be compared, in breadth and depth, to those of Louis Lavelle, Wagner, Picasso, Eliot, or Heisenberg. If there is a sense in distinguishing between “content” and “form,” it is when taking the form of the spiritual experience as such as a synonym for “content,” prior and independent of the concrete form of the “work,” behind which it can be perceived in filigree (by those who, of course, possess similar or better experience).

Note that in all these cases, the qualitative judgment of the spiritual experience transcends and abolishes the differences between the formal disciplines (physics, music, poetry, etc.) that served as the mold for its incarnation in historically recorded works.

It is not necessary here to take the word “initiation” in the strict and conventional sense of belonging to a brotherhood of mysteries and submission to traditional rites officiated by flesh-and-blood hierophants. The spirit blows where it wills, and no secret order or public church possessing the monopoly of divine inspiration, it is predictable that, the more corrupt and exhausted churches and secret orders become, the more cases of spontaneous inner experiences and direct communication between Sense and the soul will multiply.

Now, it remains to explain the nature of the diverse elaboration that the poet, philosopher, physicist, etc., undertake according to the demands of their respective trades.

That one spiritual experience can be quite similar to another; that experience as such cannot bear the mark of the differences between art and philosophy, science, and religion, is something proven by the fact that the inner universes of two men of different intellectual professions can be much more related to each other than those of two men of the same profession. Dante’s universe is more similar to that of Saint Thomas than to that of Petrarch, despite the differences in the concrete form in the first pair and the similarities in the second; the world of Saint Bonaventure, shaped in the form of a theological treatise, is the same as that of the poet Saint Francis of Assisi but quite different from that of his fellow workers (and literary genre companions), Albert and Thomas.

The affinities of “content,” in the sense of the community of spiritual experience, transcend not only the differences from one discipline to another, from one genre to another, but even the diversity of ideas and personal convictions: Dostoevsky’s world has more affinities with Freud’s than with that of his contemporary and colleague Turgenev, and Freud’s, in turn, resembles more the theater of Schnitzler than all the clinical psychiatry of the time. Similarly, Bergson and Proust are closer to each other than the former is to Brunschvicg and the latter to Gide, their contemporaries and colleagues.

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely, but one would be enough to show that there is no bond of reciprocal implication between the nature of the spiritual experience and the modality or genre of its concrete expression in the forms of recognized cultural disciplines. The inner history, the spiritual history of humanity, does not coincide with the history of forms or disciplines, much less with the "history of ideas."33

3. Bernanos' Silent Glory

The year of the fiftieth anniversary of Georges Bernanos' death has ended, and no one wrote anything about the great exile in the country he chose as his second homeland, where he wrote some of his most forceful books – Lettre aux Anglais, Les Enfants Humiliés – and where he had more friends than in his native land.

The silence is perhaps explained by the simple fact that Bernanos dead is even more uncomfortable than he was in life. There is no one more troublesome than the one who is right. Usually, time reveals who is right, and the truthful minority, temporarily defeated by dominant lies, eventually has its day of revenge. However, in Bernanos' case, there is no winning party to celebrate his prophet’s glory posthumously. Bernanos did not stand for any particular party: he stood against them all. He attacked, with equal measures of anger and lucidity, the Republic and the monarchy, communism and capitalism, the Revolution and the Old Regime, fascism and anti-fascism, Jews and anti-Semites, the clergy and atheists, the Masons and those who denounced Masonic conspiracies. Hence, no one was left to celebrate his victory.

The first to be defeated was the French right, to which he had served for so many years and whose demise he predicted – and desired – the moment it betrayed the nation, religion, and traditions by selling itself to the Prometheanism of the Darwinian and racist invader, the embodiment of what he called “the revolt of races against nations” (a revolt that, changing color, is still ongoing). A nation, he said, is a product of history and experience, a pact of friendship and collaboration laboriously erected among races, groups, and families. The race, a biological community without history, lifted its animal head to destroy, in a few decades, two thousand years of culture – the entire heritage that the right had claimed to defend.

But the betrayal was not only ideological; it was also strategic. For a decade, against the leftist hypocrisy that, following Stalin, sought accommodation with Hitler and the dismantling of the Army, the French right had called for rearmament, foreseeing war. After the invasion, the roles reversed: the right became collaborators, and the left, suddenly accommodating the USSR’s shift, managed to pass itself off as “early” resisters.

The left was also defeated, its hypocrisy constantly exposed by a succession of scandals and disasters, from the Khrushchev report to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Democracy was defeated too, in its eagerness to rebuild the war-torn world, gradually using all the means of economic centralization and social control it had denounced in Nazi and Communist dictatorships, ultimately reaching the pinnacle of degradation by turning “human rights” into a tool of psychological oppression to dominate the frightened masses.

The Eastern European countries were defeated, escaping the Nazi wolf only to fall into the clutches of the Communist bear.

The Western powers were defeated as well, conceding half of Europe to the USSR, facilitating Soviet support for Chinese communism, the bloodiest tyranny of all time, resulting in the death of sixty million people – twenty million more than the total deaths of a war ostensibly fought to end tyrannies.

The Jews were defeated, in their rush to obtain material compensation for their suffering, exchanging their spiritual birthright for a police state hated by its neighbors and threatened by internal and external fanaticism.

The Catholic Church was also defeated, after aligning itself with parafascist corporatism, quickly shifting to overt support for atheistic progressivism, with the canine solicitude of one who, having lost its way, lavishes flattery on the first who gives it a lift to anywhere.

Last but not least, the people were defeated, no longer existing. Uprooted from their values and traditions, thrown into the whirlwind of a destiny they do not understand, dishonored and demoralized, having lost their identity, which was the fruit of history and the millennial practice of rituals, they have become an anonymous mass of loose atoms, with no other point of convergence than a TV screen from which they receive their daily dose of false fears, false revolts, false hopes, carefully calculated to abolish in them all sense of reality.

In the end, no one was left. Bernanos gathered everyone, communists and Christians, democrats and fascists, clergy and politicians, intellectuals and military, elite and people, under the general denomination of “les imbéciles,” certain that in the saving warnings he directed at them, they would be unable to see – with that infallible self-projective capacity of those who see nothing – anything but extravagant and purposeless anger.

Bernanos never had the illusion of being understood. But then, who was he speaking to? Curiously, this man, who on the surface of the world expected nothing but a callous stupidity consolidated by persistent sins, could glimpse, deep within each creature, a mysteriously preserved zone of all corruption, all lies, all self-deception. If Descartes said that all our mistakes come from the fact that before being adults, we were children, Bernanos thought exactly the opposite: the problem is precisely that we become adults and get contaminated with “l’incurable frivolité des gens sérieuses” (the incurable frivolity of serious people).

“I write,” he said, “only to be faithful to the boy I once was.” But that boy still remembered his childhood companions and recognized their faces, hidden beneath the anonymous mask of the crowd:

Companions, strangers, old brothers, one day we shall arrive together at the gates of God’s kingdom. Weary troop, exhausted troop, whitened by the dust of the roads, beloved hard faces whose sweat I failed to wipe, gazes that witnessed good and evil, fulfilled their duty, embraced life and death, O gazes that never surrendered! I shall find you again, old brothers. Just as my childhood dreamed you.

It was for these companions, still children and already immersed in the light of eternity, that he wrote. Thus, ultimately, they all understood him.

Among Catholic writers, none revered the Child Jesus more than Bernanos, the cult of invincible innocence. While Mauriac, Julien Green, and Graham Greene believed that Christian novels could only revolve around sin, with redemption merely hinted at from afar, Bernanos was the only writer, truly the only one in all universal literature, who managed to make holiness the very substance of the novel’s plot. His Diary of a Country Priest, which André Malraux and General de Gaulle considered the greatest novel in the French language, is an artistic tour de force in which, violating all apparent laws of fictional conflict, evil only appears on the periphery of the scene, with the center always occupied by sanctifying Grace.

Henri Montaigu, the great historian of spiritual France, who died prematurely, pointed out that, in the abysmal degradation of the Catholic clergy since the 18th century, the modern phenomenon of lay apostolate arises spontaneously, with figures like Léon Bloy and Georges Bernanos at the forefront. They retained something essential from the Christian legacy, which is no longer heard in what the spokesmen of the Catholic Church, both “officially” (let us say) and supposedly “dissident,” have to say. If you want to know what Catholicism is, forget the priests, the cardinals, the theologians. Read Bernanos.

Perhaps not by chance, the writer who throughout his life listened to the Holy Spirit had none of the external appearances of an ascetic. This voluminous man lived intensely and did not deprive himself of any bodily pleasures. He ate, drank, smoked, fought, made love. He even indulged, a motorcycle enthusiast before the Almighty, in the most modern pleasure of all, the thrill of speed, until breaking the same leg twice. However, he was genuinely an ascetic, perhaps the severest anchorite of the century, practicing the hardest discipline, inaccessible to many ascetics: he abstained from all the lies and collective illusions in which his contemporaries delighted, and to which many of us still beg for the morphine drop of false consolation.

He did not believe in socialism or fascism, democracy or technology, war or peace, the State or capital, promises of the future or a return to the past. He was never deceived by anything and even became, in contrast to almost all intellectuals of his time, a man of iron who did not need to cling to anything, who could live naked and devoid of all ideological protection.

Faced with the world’s folly, he did not even need the masochistic pride of the Stoic in the ruin of Rome, a ragged invalid clinging to the illusion of his own honor. Honor itself had become for him a dispensable luxury. For this reason, he could cast a more penetrating gaze on things than that of coldness: the fiery gaze of one who saw beyond the curtain of the world, in the perspective of the Final Judgment.

In his novels, every action is lived inseparably on two levels, brought together by the magic of words: the level of narrative time and that of eternity. Each decision, each glance, each gesture reveals its ultimate and definitive meaning in an instant: far beyond mere psychological unmasking, there rises the full metaphysical elucidation of everything that, for good or ill, has happened in this world. For this reason, his analyses of politics and history are so painfully true, as are his apocalyptic predictions that fifty years have continued to confirm. They blend into a single luminous ray the innocence of a child’s gaze and the complete, irrevocable disenchantment of one who has definitively given up believing in the world; of one who has become so realistic that he no longer needs even to cultivate the worst illusion of all, the one that remains at the bottom of the skeptical abyss, the illusion of realism:

I have always said that realism, far from being the perfection of politics, is, on the contrary, its negation. Lying and perjury are advantageous only in a world of honest people. But when the use of lies and perjury becomes general or even universal, the Machiavellis and the Tartuffes, all deprived of raw material, namely, the good faith of others, are reduced to the sad condition of unemployed.

Bernanos was, in a way, the symmetrical inversion of Chesterton’s atheist, who, “having ceased to believe in God, it is not that he does not believe in anything: he believes in everything.” Bernanos never needed to believe in anything because he believed in the one thing necessary.

November 25, 1998.

4. The Discreet Dynamiter

Maquiavel used to say that it’s better to be feared than loved. In this respect, Wilson Martins has nothing to complain about: I have never heard a word of sympathy regarding this critic, to whom his detractors do not spare, however, the respectful homage of their growls emitted from a prudent distance.

But what is so fearsome about this peaceful scholar? It is that he possesses the natural credibility of an honest critic, proven over four decades of rigorous literary exercise, and made immune to malicious attacks—that is, the only weapon left against someone who claims that two plus two equals four.

Martins, everyone proclaims, is a curmudgeon. Indeed, he is. He is an inconvenient man who dares to place Mr. Jô Soares and Mr. Chico Buarque hors de la littérature and refrains from providing many explanations, considering them too obvious. He stands out from the crowd mainly because he prefers literature more than its authors, and he judges them based on the services they render to it, with no concessions to the vanity of those who merely exploit it.

Such is he, that his curmudgeonly nature does not dull his literary insight and the rigor of his judgment. Some time ago, he wrote a dreadful article about Bruno Tolentino, making the worst insinuations against the poet, which are not worth recalling. In the last paragraph, he shifted the focus from the man to his work and admitted that it was “better than that of the best”: Cecília, Bandeira, Drummond.

It’s maddening. A Brazilian who, in the midst of anger, still has enough conscience scruples to seek fairness, and does so without any stinginess or malice, can only be a monster of coldness. Such a person stands in stark contrast to a country where the highest sanctity lies in sinning in the name of “emotion.”

To worsen things even further, Martins, perhaps because he lived in New York for so long, masters the typically Anglo-Saxon art of understatement. He sets a bomb under the bridge with the same indifferent face he puts sugar in his tea. One of his immortal footnotes in Estadão destroyed the false reputation of a pretentious intellectual without needing a single word. It was about a theorist of “process poem”—a school derived from concretism that, with absurdly precious arguments, ended up reducing poetry to a mixture of geometry and graphic art. I didn’t keep the entire footnote, but summarizing, it was something like this:

"Mr. So-and-so, in his theory, affirms that ↓ x ± © ◻.

The main argument he claims in favor of this is that ≡ √ ◊ ∑ ↔ .

Therefore, we can conclude that ↑ ⊥ * ‍¤‍‍‍ ∂".

Not always does Wilson Martins' aristocratically disdainful style reach such refinement. But restraining his opinion, allowing the facts to speak for themselves, is characteristic of his writings, in which, from time to time, the usually impartial and dispassionate tone becomes even more neutral and distant, transforming into a subtle irony that, for those who perceive it, is irresistibly comical. His masterful History of Brazilian Intelligence, which traces the mutations of the national spirit in its literary expressions almost year by year, is full of passages like these.

The adopted method is descriptive, taking both good and bad works, lofty ideas, and monumental follies as samples and symptoms of the mental state of our literary classes at each stage of History. Here and there, the author allows himself a very measured opinion, a judgment of value. But when he describes some sheer nonsense, some sample of the intellectual teratology with which our History is replete, all opinion is suspended, and the description, the colder it is, suffices to make the reader laugh… or cry. Balancing on a razor’s edge between a pity that does not wish to emphasize the ridiculous and a cynicism that emphasizes it by contrast, Wilson Martins' style, in these passages, is more than that of a great critic: it is that of an artist of words.

January 23, 1998.

5. Learning to Write

The act of learning to write – this is the very essence of a synthetic formula that contains many truths, but because it is so frequently repeated, it ends up having value in itself, like a fetish, emptied of those valuable contents that, to be grasped, would require the formula to be first denied and dialectically relativized rather than accepted without further thought.

To read, yes, but what to read? And is mere reading enough, or is something more required with what is read? When the formula replaces these two questions instead of eliciting them, it no longer holds any meaning.

The selection of readings presupposes many readings, and there would be no way out of this vicious circle without the distinction between two types: readings for mere inspection lead to the choice of a certain number of titles for careful and in-depth reading. It is this latter type that teaches how to write, but one cannot reach this stage without the former. The former, in turn, requires seeking and consulting.

Therefore, there is no serious reading without mastery of chronologies, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and general historical reviews. The person who has never read a book to the end but has, through searching indexes and archives, acquired a systemic vision of what to read in the following years, is already more educated than someone who, right off the bat, has immersed themselves in the Divine Comedy or Critique of Pure Reason without knowing where they came from or why they are reading them. But there is also what, if I’m not mistaken, Borges said: “To understand a single book, you must have read many books.”

The art of reading is a simultaneous operation on two planes, like in a portrait where the painter has to work on the details of the foreground and the lines of the background at the same time. The difference between a cultured and an uncultured reader is that the latter takes the current language of the media and vulgar conversations as the background, a one-dimensional frame of reference where everything subtle, profound, personal, and significant in a writer is lost. The former has more points of comparison because, knowing the tradition of the art of writing, they speak the language of writers, which is never “the language of everyone,” even though some good writers, mistaken about themselves, may think it is.

There is no such thing as a “language of everyone.” There are languages of regions, groups, families, and there are general codifications that formalize them synthetically. One of these codifications is the language of the media. It proceeds through statistical reduction and the establishment of standardized phrases that, through repetition, acquire automatic functionality.

Another, in opposition, is that of literary art. This one uses the richest and most meaningful expressions capable of conveying what could hardly be expressed without them.

The language of the media or the public square quickly and functionally repeats what everyone already knows. The language of writers makes sayable something that, without them, could hardly be perceived. The former delimits a collective horizon of perception within which everyone, by perceiving the same things in the same way and with minimal effort of attention, believes they perceive everything. The latter opens up, for attentive individuals, the knowledge of things that were perceived only by those who paid great attention before them.

It also establishes a community of perception, but it is not the community of the public square: it is the community of attentive men of all times and places – the community of those whom Schiller called “children of Jupiter.” This community does not physically gather like masses in a stadium, nor statistically like the community of consumers and voters. Its members communicate only through reflections sent, now and then, by the eyes of solitary souls that shine in the dark vastness, like the lights of farms and villages seen from the window of an airplane at night.

One is the language of false obviousness, the other is that of the “authentic personal perceptions” spoken of by Saul Bellow. Many mad scientists, including our literature professors, claim that there is no difference. But the only scientific method on which they rely to make this statement is the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the most foolish of sophistical devices, which consists of deducing, from their own ignorance of something, the objective non-existence of that thing.

The literary language does indeed exist because great writers read each other, learn from each other, and, like any other professional community, have their traditions of learning, their passwords, and their initiation codes. Trying to deny this historical fact by the impossibility of deducing it from Saussure’s rules is like denying the existence of atomic particles because it is impossible to simultaneously know their velocity and position.

The selection of readings should be guided, above all, by the desire to grasp, in the variety of what is read, the unwritten rules of that universal code that connects Shakespeare to Homer, Dante to Faulkner, Camilo to Sophocles and Euripides, Eliot to Confucius and Jalal-Ed-Din Rûmi.

Understood in this way, reading has an element of initiatory adventure: it is the conquest of the lost word that provides access to the keys of a hidden kingdom. Anything else is mere professional routine, pedantry, or childish amusement.

But acquiring the code requires, in addition to reading, active absorption. You must, beyond just listening, practice the language of the writer you are reading. To practice, in ancient Portuguese, also means to converse. If you are reading Dante, try to write like Dante. Translate passages from him, imitate the tone, the symbolic allusions, the manner, the worldview. Imitation is the only way to assimilate deeply. Just as you cannot learn English or Spanish by merely listening without ever trying to speak, it is no different with the styles of writers.

The current fetishism of “originality” and “creativity” inhibits the practice of imitation. It wants learners to create using nothing or the pure language of the media. The most they can produce is creatively standardized banalities.

No one achieves originality without having mastered the technique of imitation. Imitating will not turn you into a servile fool, first because no servile fool reaches the height of being able to imitate the greats, second because by imitating one, then another, and another, you will not become similar to any of them, but by composing with what you have learned from them, your personal arsenal of ways of expression will ultimately be yourself, only potentiated and ennobled by the weapons you acquired.

In this and only this sense, reading teaches how to write. It is a reading that presupposes the selective search for unity behind the variety, learning through active imitation, and the construction of a personal repertoire in constant growth and development. Many who now pose as writers have not only never gone through this learning process but also cannot even imagine that it exists. But without it, everything is barbarism and industrialized inculturation.

O Globo, February 3, 2001.

6. The Art of Writing, Lesson 1: Forget the Writing Manual

As some readers have been asking me for advice on the art of writing, I decided to pull out these observations that I wrote six years ago for a course that had the title, precisely, of “Reading and Writing”, to which I have nothing to add.

I

The circular from the editorial board of Veja, reproduced in the July 1992 issue of Unidade, the newspaper of the São Paulo Journalists' Union, is a sample of the state of almost hypnotic unconsciousness into which our best press professionals are sinking every day, driven by the mechanics of the job.

The document, a list of 27 rules laid down by the bosses with the purpose of “combating language vices,” is presented by the Union’s newspaper as a sign of health: proof that Veja, at the height of its fame, has not lost its head and is still capable of self-criticism.

Seen in its nearest context, as a sign of sensible retreat in the face of the temptation of intoxication, it may indeed be a good thing. But, in the larger context of the evolution of Brazilian journalism over the past few decades, the 27 rules change shape: they become the alarming symptom of the consolidation of a set of mental tics as Lex maxima of good journalism. Tics, because they do not even amount to prejudices. Prejudices are beliefs that, escaping conscious examination, guide behavior, shape practice. But these rules are not seriously intended to be put into practice because they are impossible to apply, as I will demonstrate later, and are instead merely intended to be flaunted, orally and in writing, as conventional emblems of good journalistic conduct.

Not only journalistic, in fact. Consecrated by repetition, maxims of this kind end up serving as a criterion for judging any writing, even outside of journalism. I have seen many an editorial guru turn up their nose at Eça, Camilo, Euclides, or Father Vieira, because they used words banned in the internal Manual: it’s like despising the Cathedral of Chartres because it does not fit the specifications of the BNH.

Let them lay down rules, fine. But they should at least have the good sense to admit that specifications dictated by mere techno-industrial convenience have no aesthetic criterion value, do not constitute, in any sense, the rules of style, unless by style one understands collective uniformity, that is, lack of style. They serve to measure the suitability of a text to the market profile of a certain editorial product, not to judge its literary quality, expressiveness, accuracy, coherence, elegance, and truthfulness. They do not even serve to assess its journalistic value, if taken in a general sense and outside of the canons of that particular publication. How to judge by them, let’s say, the journalism of a Mauriac, an Ortega y Gasset, an Alain, or, closer to us, a Monteiro Lobato? Style is the adaptation of a subject’s language to his own expressive needs, or to the demands of the subject, not to any prior external mold, be it loose or narrow. It is only metaphorically, and forcing the issue, that the word “style” can designate the uniform system of verbal tics imitated by a whole body of editors; more properly, this system would be called a standardization of the lack of style.

Standardization may be an unavoidable evil. But why exaggerate, seeing in it an absolute good, the very model of good writing? That a boss, zealous of his career, comes to internalize so deeply the profile of the product that is commissioned to him, to the point that even in his leisure time he is unable to form sentences outside of its specifications without feeling guilt and remorse, is something I understand; that he then wishes to shape the heads of his subordinates according to these same specifications, in the name of discipline and efficiency, is something I not only understand but also admit and even praise. But that he, finally, in an access of self-glorification, imagines himself transfigured into a master of Portuguese, literature, or “style,” is too much. No weaver in R. José Paulino, when adjusting his machines so that the blouses come out to measure, imagines that he is setting the standards for judging global elegance.

Career executives turned literary theorists are the scourge of newsrooms. In the name of a product profile, commercial contingency elevated to the golden rule of aesthetic judgment, they impose standards of taste, lash out with the pen at will, sadistically amuse themselves playing Graciliano Ramos in front of a frightened seal audience, who, never having read the real Graciliano, actually believe that he would be capable of writing something cute like this from the Veja manual: “Short sentence is good and I like. With one word only. Like this. Try.” Yes, try: do something different. Graciliano had a sense of melodic continuity, he would never confuse short sentences with hysterical gesticulations. Nor would he utter maxims of this abysmal depth: “No one writes correctly if they do not read”, a sentence that would be worthy of Counselor Acácio, were it not, in fact, authored by him. Taking production norms as literary taste criteria, these people are turning journalism into what its detractors wish it to be: the most typical species of sub-literature.

Norms of writing, if established, should be presented with all modesty as practical, neutral conventions, neither better nor worse than any others, and never as standards of “good taste,” “elegance,” etc., which are values of literary aesthetics much more subtle than what this kind of manual is capable of defining. The manuals should stick as much as possible to the external and “material” aspects of writing, such as spelling, abbreviations, standardization of names, avoiding pontificating about style, or at least expressing opinions about it with extreme care and solely in the name of utilitarian convenience, not aesthetics. In cases where it is absolutely necessary to express an opinion about style, it would be best to remain at a generic and abstract level, avoiding dubious particularities like banning specific words or expressions. After all, even the most basic knowledge of stylistics shows that there are no words or expressions that are inherently inelegant; everything depends on the context, tone, and greater or lesser ingenuity with which they are used. In the right place, even the execrated “outrossim” may fit well, despite Graciliano Ramos' famous remark when revising an article for the magazine Cultura Política: “Outrossim is b. s.” [note: “b. s.” stands for “bullshit”.]

Molding the human mind according to a set of practical norms, without balancing it with an awareness of the merely conventional nature of those norms, can lead to a true intellectual mutilation, making it, in the long run, incapable of understanding and appreciating anything beyond the customary standard. The almost absolute incapacity to read more abstract texts, such as philosophy and science, that I observe in so many of my colleagues, does not result from any congenital deficiency but rather from the acquired habit of dealing with only one dimension of language, allowing the sensitivity to all other dimensions to atrophy: the habit of flat and shallow writing produces flat and shallow reading.

One of the most evident signs of an alert intelligence is the perception of contradictions. Aristotle already observed that logical sense and the sense of the illogical are one and the same thing. When I read something full of obvious contradictions and know that the author is not stupid or intentionally sophistical, I can only conclude that they were distracted, naive, or drunk when writing it. The document from Veja was certainly produced in one of these states. I promised and I will show that it is a jumble of impossible and mutually contradictory demands. However, before doing so, I want to make the following psychological observation: since it is not plausible for an editor-in-chief to fall into a lethargic sleep just when issuing important orders, the author of the document (whom I don’t know, by the way) most likely lives in this state permanently. On the other hand, it is also not plausible that Veja has chosen an editor-in-chief who is abnormally more distracted than others, so I suppose that his colleagues also did not notice the contradictions I will point out (just as the editor of Unidade who transcribed and praised the document did not notice them). If that’s the case, then Veja’s circular is a sign of some epidemic numbness of intelligence afflicting our professional category.

The examples I provide below show how attachment to routine norms, sedimented through intense and continuous practice, can render a good journalist insensitive to the worst contradictions and transform them into a confident proclaimer of incongruities.

II

Veja’s circular is a set of rules, but it is also a text itself. Applying these rules to the writing of the same text would result in suppressing at least one-third of it. Take the first paragraph (rule 1):

Cut all superfluous words. Filling with padding is the worst curse of a weekly news magazine.

Applying the same rule to the writing of the same sentence, it would be as follows:

Cut superfluous words. Filling with padding is the curse of a news magazine.

In obedience to the rule, I cut the following superfluous words:

1st: “all” – the phrase “superfluous words” is generic, and as a genre necessarily includes all its species, the pronoun is redundant;

2nd: “the worst” – because a curse is necessarily a bad thing.

3rd: “weekly” – because it is not understood that the prohibition of padding should be revoked in monthly magazines or daily newspapers.

Three words in two lines, isn’t that enough padding? However, the sentence is not poorly written. The rule itself is excessive. Besides, it was already violated even before being written because the introduction of the document says:

“As much as photographers, illustrators, paginators, and graphic artists complain…”

Well then, isn’t an illustrator a graphic artist? We run the risk of soon seeing our sausage adversary distributing warnings “to all endocrinologists, pediatricians, geriatricians, and doctors,” “to all men, women, and human beings,” etc.

In the same introduction, the accused individual denounces the language vices that

“...are sullying our pages with the same voracity as medieval heresies…”

Oh, people! Has anyone ever seen someone “sully with voracity”? With voracity, you eat, devour, swallow, ingest, grab. To sully is to make a stain, to let dirt fall on top, it indicates or implies a movement outwards, from the subject to an object, exactly the opposite of the movement inwards indicated by voracious ingestion.

The image becomes even more shocking when we see that, in rule 14, its author, with the air of a straight-A student, issues (should I say “voraciously expels”?) a precept for image editing: “When choosing a line of images, stick to it.” Yes, for example: start with a gastronomic image and complete it with something very proctological.

What is even more extraordinary is that the aforementioned author mentions, as examples of well-made images, those that he himself uses in the introduction. He could even cite himself as an example of modesty, if he hadn’t already done so by admitting that he is not Moses and that his rules are not the Tablets of the Law, a warning that, if not deemed necessary, would be suppressed (in accordance with rule 1).

But the author’s infidelity to his own rules does not completely invalidate them, logically speaking; it only undermines his credibility. To invalidate them completely, an internal contradiction between rules would be required.

Here’s an example. Rule 5 warns: “Beware of adverbs,” and recommends removing them, concluding: “The adjective alone is enough.” However, later on, in rule 26, Machado de Assis and… Euclides da Cunha are recommended as gurus for learning good writing. Hasn’t the chief ever read Euclides? Because he was abundant in adverbs; the profusion of them was one of the defects that critics of Os Sertões pointed out most frequently, forcing the author’s admirers to defend him.34 How will the poor apprentices look to both Euclides' example and the chief’s words at the same time? And the example given as proof of the universality of adverbs is, at the very least, perjurious:

“Beware of adverbs. ‘Fulano is an animal completely screwed on all four legs,’ says Sicrano de Tal irritatedly. The quotation already shows that Sicrano was very upset. If it didn’t show, it wouldn’t be an adverb that would improve the situation.”

It seems that the individual doesn’t see any difference between saying something irritatedly, jokingly, ironically, disdainfully, etc.

One of the main differences between oral and written language is that, in the latter, quotations generally do not convey the tone, emphasis, gesture, or facial expression with which the sentences were spoken; and adverbs exist precisely to “improve the situation” in such cases, avoiding tedious descriptions (unless Veja has become multimedia, with each statement accompanied by its respective video).

In addition to contradictions, there are also incorrect information. Rule 6 establishes:

“Unless I’m mistaken, Portuguese is one of the few languages that do not conjugate the future tense. Take advantage of it. ‘Collor will change the ministry’ is much more precise and elegant than 'Collor is going to change the ministry.’”

Here, the chief was saved by the caveat. Because this is precisely a mistake. Celso Cunha, on page 268 of his Gramática do Português Contemporâneo 35, explains that the auxiliary verb ir is used “with the infinitive of the main verb, to express the firm purpose of performing the action, or the certainty that it will be performed in the near future”; while the simple future admits, in one of its meanings, the expression of mere probability. Therefore, if the ministry change is a firm certainty, “Collor is going to change the ministry” is much more precise than “Collor will change the ministry.” It is a logical and temporal nuance of great importance. Also, concerning words, economy can sometimes be the basis of trash.

The example given, by the way, also contradicts rule 5, which says not to abuse “much.” Calling something “much more precise” when it is not at all more precise, is or isn’t it abusing “much”? But the very rule of preferring the simple future contradicts rule 20, which advises preferring colloquial language whenever possible. Who, in colloquial speech, says “I will do” instead of “I’m going to do”?

As for the expression “unless I’m mistaken,” the author uses it ironically, as he believes he is not mistaken and also prohibits its use in rule 7. However, since he was indeed mistaken, the irony turned against the ironist. Involuntary humor is the almost inevitable result of writing without thinking.

If these rules had been calculated Machiavellianly with the purpose of confusing novices, humiliating them, and making them docile, nothing could stop them. Take rule 13, for example:

“The more concrete the image, the better. Do not mix real things with abstractions. ‘The toucans took flight towards modernity’ mixes a bird with a concept.”

The rule is clear. But how to apply it? By writing, for example, like the chief in his introduction, that “some bonfires are necessary to maintain the stylistic purity of the magazine”? Isn’t stylistic purity an abstract concept? Doesn’t fire physically burn? If toucans can only take flight towards very concrete perches, then flames can only consume solecisms, not the paper that displays them. If I could eliminate the illogicality of the content of this unfortunate Veja circular by burning it, I would certainly have done so; but, mindful not to mix the abstract and the concrete, I refrained from resorting to the fiery measure and set about writing these long and tedious observations.

If they seem hostile, insolent, or malevolent, I say that I don’t know who the editor-in-chief of Veja is and that it’s nothing personal, just business. Let the blow strike the error, not the person of its author. This person must be an excellent professional, at least as good as his colleagues, and that is precisely why the error is significant and worthy of public correction, which would not be the case with mere personal incompetence.

I also recall an episode. Ciro Franklin de Andrade, who was one of my first mentors in journalism, had an exemplary habit. When a novice wrote nonsense, he would take them aside and discreetly give them paternal explanations. But if it was the work of a chief, an experienced professional, a journalism figure, he would simply cut out the passage and paste it on the bulletin board, for the instruction of apprentices and the punishment of instructors. Cruel? Unforgettable.

November 22, 1998.

7. Still on the Art of Writing

As I was saying, imitation is the best way to learn how to write. Many readers rightfully asked me whom I imitated. Throughout my life, I’ve practiced imitation exercises. I never published or kept any of them, of course, but the voices of the masters I chose still resonate in what I write – at least to my own ears.

Among the classics of the Portuguese language, my main influences were Camões, Antônio Ferreira, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Camilo, and Euclides. Machado was a delight, not a lesson. I never consciously imitated him because, despite my devotion to him, the differences in our personalities are too profound. I cannot envision myself as shy, reserved, elegant, and moreover, a civil servant.

However, I can easily picture myself as a navigator and adventurer like our Renaissance classics, a mad polemicist doubled with a metaphysician like Camilo, or a mix of scientist and reporter like Euclides.

Empathy is everything in the learning through imitation. That’s why everyone must choose their own models.

Here, mine enter as mere samples. Truth be told, I never liked Eça very much. He writes so smoothly because his thinking is easy, light, without depth or inner struggle. I don’t recall ever going back to one of his pages. Pessoa, like Machado, was an impossible love. He is marvelous, but I would never desire to be that somber English teacher, shrouded in mystery and lacking the courage to decipher it.

Also, I don’t owe anything literary to Bruno Tolentino, despite the friendship and boundless admiration I have for him. The factor that sets us apart is sociological. Being a ‘brega’ by origin and vocation, I cannot identify with the cultural roots – hence, not even with the verbal tone – of a young man from a celebrated family, related to half of the world, raised among literati.

I was a friend and devoted disciple of Herberto Sales. The first sight I had of him was that of a chubby old mulatto man, sitting in a corner in the lobby of the Glória Hotel with a book and a little notebook. The book was a volume of Proust. In the notebook, Herberto wrote down, in tiny handwriting, the verbal solutions he could use. Few Brazilian authors, as Otto Maria Carpeaux said, had such an awakened, acute, and hardworking artistic conscience as Herberto Sales.

I also learned from Carpeaux himself, of whom I read practically everything published in Portuguese. He was not visual but auditory. He didn’t make us see things but guess them from their repercussion in epochs and souls. He had the chamber music art of subtly introducing a theme in a short article, developing it, making it resonate in many octaves, and quickly resolving it in the final lines with an abrupt and stunning “coda.” Among us, no one mastered the technique of the short essay, the poetic condensation of enormously complex scientific controversies, as he did.

I owe much to Nelson Rodrigues as well. Two titles sum up all his writing art: “A vida como ela é” and “O óbvio ululante.” The secret of his style is the audacity to express things in the most direct and ordinary manner, transfiguring the prosaic into a symbol. I find nothing similar except in Pío Baroja and Julien Green, though the former lacks Nelson’s cynicism and the latter has a different, colder, and resigned cynicism.

But the art of summarizing an entire argument in a brief, brutally impactful sentence – which many condemn me for as if it were proof of some undesirable feelings – I learned from three saints: Saint Paul the Apostle, Saint Augustine, and Saint Bernard. Everything has a price. Nobody can imitate saints, not even in literature, without scandalizing an intellectual world of powder puffs.

Among the foreign authors of the 20th century, besides Baroja and Green, the ones who taught me the most were Ortega y Gasset and Bernanos. Ortega is by far the greatest prose writer in the Spanish language, without equals in it or any other language for his power to make you see what he talks about. Actually, more than making you see, he himself compared the enticing power of his style to a fist jumping off the page and grabbing the reader by the throat, forcing him to engage in the discussion as if it were a personal problem. Bernanos' pages arouse a similar effect, but with the pathos of an infuriated moralist that completely lacks the amiable and gentle qualities of Ortega.

As a writer of philosophy books, I had to deal with the problems of philosophical exposition, which are more complex from a technical-literary standpoint than generally imagined. For me, the greatest philosophical expositor of all time (not the greatest philosopher, of course) was Éric Weil. In his writings, abstract construction rises to the heights of aesthetic achievement, but it is an aesthetic that, instead of adorning conceptual thought, directly embodies the philosophical spirit itself. The strength of his style is the beauty of reason when it reaches the highest level of pure metaphysical necessity. However, to appreciate it, one must have developed the sense of that necessity, which is completely lacking in gross minds, divided between empirical chaos and empty logical formalism. To these minds, the vigor of the proof may give the impression of dogmatic authoritarianism, of imposing one’s will, when it actually comes from the opposite, from the complete surrender of the will to what simply is.

Similar virtues, to a lesser degree, I find in Edmund Husserl and Louis Lavelle, with the caveat that the latter insists too much on what he has already demonstrated, and the former abuses technical terms in favor of brevity, which, as Horace once said, opposes clarity.

The great philosophical expositor has nothing “didactic” about them. Philosophy, being education in its most intimate essence, is therefore metadidactic, with no possibility of a graded series from the easiest to the most difficult. In philosophy, the best way to express oneself is the one that most directly and faithfully embodies the philosophical method itself, and the best philosophical method is the one that most effectively grasps the thing being discussed, without adding to its simplicity or subtracting from its complexity. Legitimate philosophical discourse can only be carried out from a philosophical point of view. There is no external frame of reference from which one can “understand” philosophy, simply because philosophy is the art of constructing the frameworks for all understanding. Consequently, “philosophical popularization” often ends up being a fraud; and the best philosophical writings almost never appear good to those who judge them from the outside, with exclusively “literary” criteria.

O Globo, May 19, 2001.

8. The Dogma of the Autonomy of Art

The dogma of the autonomy of art falls to the simple realization that the aesthetic – as well as the logical, ethical, historical, social, and other aspects of the work of art or anything else that exists in this world – is only distinguishable in the mind, but not separable in re.

That follies like “art for art’s sake” and its sister-enemy, “committed art,” have been able to face each other with airs of serious hostility in the contemporary culture ring, only shows the complete lack of philosophical spirit in most members of the speaking class.

There is not a single fact, thing, or being in the universe that possesses only the aesthetic, or ethical, or logical dimension, to the exclusion of all others. A geometry theorem, an algebraic calculation, no matter how purely mathematical they may seem, cannot prevent themselves from having a certain aesthetic form, even though in most of the uses we make of them we do not take this aspect into account, at least consciously; and by a curious irony, the mathematician is among human beings the most sensitive to the beauty of the demonstrative architectures of his science, merely omitting to become aware of its character as an aesthetic thing and to draw from this the consequences that a sense of philosophical responsibility, if he had it, would impose on him, and enjoying his pleasure with the naivety of the child who handles the penis without having any idea that he is doing something erotic.

Likewise, a painting or a sonata cannot prevent themselves from necessarily having an underlying logical-mathematical structure, even though the viewer and the listener are leagues away from realizing that in this structure lies the condition of possibility of a pleasure they naively suppose immediate, perhaps “visceral”, and devoid of any intellectual or discursive background; and that they enjoy it with the naive immediacy of the child who rejoices at Santa’s presents without having any idea of the underlying financial calculation that makes them possible.

In the end, neither the sonata nor the theorem would be conceivable in the air, without the historical-social and psychological conditions that allowed their discovery at a given moment, by the more or less accidental agreement between their pure form – aesthetic or conceptual – and the forma mentis of a certain individual in a certain chapter of his inner evolution. Similarly, neither theorem nor sonata would enter the historical-cultural world through their technical and economic consequences if there was not some kind of harmony between their pure form and the bed of the historical river where these consequences are going to flow.

Even though all these aspects and sides remain distinct and theoretically unmistakable, they never exist separately and only manifest themselves as distinct by an effort of abstraction, just like the shape, color, and number that only the mind distinguishes in bodies but cannot exist by themselves and separately compose some real being.

What applies to the entities of nature and the ideal objects of mathematics also applies a fortiori to the sphere of human creations and culture. An artist cannot prevent his work from having a conceptual, logical-discursive, or mathematical substructure (even if multiple and contradictory, which produces the illusion of non-discursiveness or non-conceptuality); neither can he avoid having an ethical, political, or pedagogical scope, even if all these aspects are outside his conscious purpose; and even if they are, this will not prevent these involuntary or undesired aspects from being an integral part of the completed work and being perceived in it as such by the gaze of posterity, however intrusive it may be.

But the artist can, on the other hand, assume these “secondary” meanings and consciously incorporate them into the living fabric of the work – this incorporation resulting precisely in that variety of planes and aspects organically coerced into a symbolic synthesis, which characterizes great and immortal works. Indeed, there is not a single work of art of real value that makes complete abstraction of extra-aesthetic, or metaesthetic consequences or intentions; and pure aestheticism, when it is not in fact an ethical-political program in disguised, ironic, and self-negating form, is, more than a program of action intended to be put into practice, an idealistic project, a mere verbal declaration of intentions, or merely a pose. That is, even the professedly aestheticist artist approaches “art for art’s sake” as an asymptote, never being able to reach it.

We can, therefore, discard the theory of the autonomy of art as irrelevant in practice, and only consider it ex-hypothesi for reasoning by absurdity.

9. Poetry and Philosophy

A prevalent opinion states that poetry conveys impressions in their immediacy, while philosophy operates upon them with reflection; one would be to the other as direct is to indirect, vivid experience to subsequently elaborated opinion, the image seen with eyes to its reflection in a mental mirror.

To me, this is utter nonsense, an inconsequential verbalization of a pure and simple impossibility. Without being able to justify itself, it is partly explained as a manifestation of the greater sympathy the people feel for the poet, a companion who helps express their impressions in a language that, if not their own, embellishes and musicalizes it; and as an expression of popular strangeness toward the philosopher, an exotic and distant figure who speaks in code and cannot completely abandon their cryptic ways to try to be communicative without becoming a little — or much — of a poet, dangerously turning their back on the strict rules of their fraternity, or even more dangerously, without becoming a rhetorician, an orator, and a politician.

In truth, the amount of reflective activity required is no less in poetry than in philosophy, for the simple reason that verse is not the experience itself but its verbal expression, obedient, like any expression, to a code of conversions; and the code is not composed of facts and data — the flesh of experience — but of rhymes and metrics and rules of grammar and epochal styles and established semantic uses and commitments to a school and a thousand other demands that are rooted in convention, science, and habit, not directly in facts. These demands are the mold in which the clothing is cut that will cover and make socially recognizable and currency the experience, intransmissible in the direct nakedness of its flesh, which is one and the same as the flesh of the body, impenetrable to another body.

Without a mold, there is no communication, and adapting to the mold is the rational and reflective part of literary creation, no one doubts that. The molds exhaust their possibility of containing new experiences and must be renewed from time to time; the history of formal revolutions in literature confirms this. With each new revolution, the expansion of the range of the sayable is achieved at the cost of a temporary loss of communicability until the new mold becomes consecrated in common use, as practice demonstrates.

What is not perceived with equal frequency is that the same happens in philosophy, where new insights must adapt to established processes of formalization and demonstration, or invent new ones; this reasoning and reflective part, which laypeople take as if it were the very essence of philosophy, is only its decent attire and the price of its preservation as a socially viable activity; and just like the conventions of poetic schools, the mold of attire can, at certain moments, oppress and suffocate philosophical intuition and even, with the arrogance of an ignorant jurist, condemn it as non-existent or extra-philosophical. 36

The starting point for resolving the problem of the relationship between poetry and philosophy lies in the following observation, which is common sense: the people’s participation in the poet’s or any other artist’s impressions is not direct and physical but imaginative. We do not fall in love with Beatriz, whom we have never seen, but with the analog the poet imagined in words; nor do we suffer physically the horrors of the House of the Dead, but only, in the mind, the nightmare that its verbal account suggests to us; a nightmare that, as such, is more tolerable than any physical suffering — which is why we avoid the horrors of prison but seek out the reading that evokes and transfigures them. We would not do this if they were one and the same thing or more or less the same thing, a crazy hypothesis that is implied in the aforementioned common opinion.

What the poet does is to produce, from internal or external experience, a molded analog, with greater or lesser success, through the intersection of a dual requirement: maximum communicability in general vocabulary and maximum fidelity — or, which comes to the same thing, ingenious and enriching infidelity — to the conventions and traditions of the craft.

I say this with two caveats.

First, general vocabulary does not necessarily mean everyday vocabulary, as the poet may use rare terms;37 it only means a non-specialized vocabulary not fixed in standard meanings; for discovering new meanings through word combinations can be, although not always, one of the unavoidable requirements for the communication of certain imaginings.

Second, in most cases, and when not perverted into fashionable or idolatrous traditionalism, the always evolving rules of the professional community precisely aim to require maximum communicability in the use of even the most erudite vocabulary.

With these two caveats, the maximum communicability of imaginative experience in general vocabulary is, rigorously speaking, the very definition of poetry, at least in its representative aspect related to the transmission of knowledge.

The poet, in short, creates, through the analogical force of images and symbols, a realm of common imaginative experience in which individuals and even epochs can meet, overcoming in the imaginary the barriers that physically separate their respective real experiences. In doing so, not only does he communicate but intercommunicates with other men. Hence the healing, magical, and soothing mission that makes poetry one of the pillars on which the very possibility of civilization rests: it liberates men from the animal night, from primitive terror that isolates and paralyzes. It gathers the tribe members around the warm fire and allows them to participate in a common universe that transcends the barriers of bodies and time. It pacifies, revives, and makes possible for those who were frightened animals to think and act.

What, in turn, does the philosopher do? The first thing they do is turn their back on the community, to ask the experience, not what it can say at the same time to all men gathered around the fire, but only what it should end up saying, if all goes well, to those few who continue to contemplate it closely until it opens and reveals its intelligible content.

Their dialogue is not with the tribe. It’s with being itself. Precisely for this reason, while history records from the beginning of time the high public prestige role that poets played as mages, hierophants, prophets, priests, and guides of peoples, the first philosophers already emerged in the condition of more or less incomprehensible oddballs to the vulgus, of aristocrats who isolated themselves in lofty solitude, like Heraclitus, or, like Socrates, of rebels who openly conflicted with popular beliefs.

The philosophical question par excellence is Quid?, "What?". What is man? What is death? What is good? What is happiness? “Reflection” does not enter here in a greater or lesser dose than in poetry, or rather, the presence of the reflective element in one and the other is equally accidental and instrumental. There is no reflection that can tell us what a thing is. Essences, or quiddities, are revealed in the intuitive act that contemplates the presence of an object, whose noetic content the philosopher does nothing but reproduce with the utmost fidelity and accuracy possible. Their activity is, as much as that of the poet, a transfer of experience, internal or external. Any defining judgment, when its object is a being and not a mere invented logical possibility – and sometimes even in this case -, is always the pure logical formalization of an intuited content, which memory fixes and inner discourse describes. And logical formalization is, as Etienne Souriau rightly saw, nothing more than stylization of inner speech, of the verbum mentis, just as the poet’s arts are the stylization of current language38.

It is only at a later stage, when confronted in the polis with the rhetoricians and sophists, bearers of false knowledge, that philosophy becomes dialectic and, through it, reflection and dialogue; but dialogue that aims to restore only, over the network of illusions of current discourse, the first intuition of self-evident essences. And as much as reflection cannot reveal essences – except in the sense of descriptive remembrance – it cannot lead to the knowledge of principles and axioms. Aristotle defines dialectic precisely as the confrontation of contradictory hypotheses that, ascending through exclusions and negations, leads to a sudden intuitive perception of the principles underlying the various disputed opinions. Dialectics is a guidance and heating of the intelligence for the awakening of intuition.

Then it’s about describing this intuition as accurately as possible, considering, on the one hand, the reality of the data and, on the other hand, the vocabulary conventions and technical requirements of logical or dialectical exposition, established by use in the professional community.

This activity is, in all and for all, similar to that of the poet. But then what’s the difference?

The difference is that the poet must transform the intuited, as immediately as possible, into current currency; they must throw the noetic content39 of an experience that can be strongly individual, into the running water of common vocabulary, to make it a possession of all men in the language of their time and their environment.

Experience, for them, is the weak and provisional moment of an activity whose strong and definitive moment is the concrete form of the finished work40.

They cannot indefinitely dwell in the critique and repetition of their experience, to gain more clarity, to integrate it more deeply into the structure of their personal being, to distinguish it in the adjacent and surrounding ones, to make it, progressively, part of ever wider experiences, to acquire about it the certainty that it has not only revealed a fleeting and accidental aspect, but the very nature of its being — acts that are, precisely, the preeminent occupations of the philosopher.

For, if they pause to enrich their inner experience to such a point, they will no longer be able to elaborate it in common vocabulary to make it immediately transmissible to all men; they will be forced to record it, if there is time left, in cryptographic abbreviations that will either imprison them in total incommunicability, or else will have to conform to the more or less standardized cryptography modes of the stubborn contemplators' fraternity, i.e., the philosophers; and they will have become a philosopher themselves. Losing in expressivity and communicability, they will have gained in richness of the inner records which, however, can only be transmitted to those who remake the same inner journey that is the essential training and toil of philosophers, happy few by constitutional fate and not by accident.

For this reason, to say of a poetry that it is a work only for poets and technicians in poetry is to point out a redhibitory vice, an intolerable flaw; but philosophy is, in principle, a thing for philosophers, and only rarely for the whole people – except when to the vocation of the philosopher is added that of the artist, or the pedagogue, or the orator and political man, which certainly is accidental and not demandable. That’s why Aristotle, elliptical, abstruse and enigmatic in his mode of expression, continues to be a greater philosopher than the crystalline Descartes or the very elegant Bergson. Communication, the concrete form of the written work, is in philosophy the accidental and lesser moment of an activity that consists, fundamentally, in knowing and not in transmitting.

Being a record and expression of deep and valuable intuitions, both poetry and philosophy have something to do with wisdom. However, there often lies an insurmountable difference between exact recording and efficient communication. The former can be personal and uncommunicable, or only communicable to those who possess the keys to the codes and recall similar inner experiences. An expression that does not express, a communication that does not communicate, is absolutely nothing.

The difference lies in direction. In poetry, wisdom is directed at men, telling them as much as possible even to passive listeners, reluctant to make a personal effort and who would hardly ever consider becoming poets or profound connoisseurs of the mysteries of the craft themselves. It is wisdom that, embodied in symbols, appeals less to the corrupted mind of men than to their body, through the magic of sounds and visible forms. Hence it can act even on men who do not understand it well. Because it is body and obeys the poet’s counsel:

let your body understand another body,

because bodies understand each other, but souls do not.

Poetry is thus the wisdom that knocks on the door of men and forces them to assimilate even something they would not wish to understand, bypassing their indifferent minds and communicating directly with the ear, the eye, the heartbeat, the feet that involuntarily set the pace of the music.41

Philosophy, on the other hand, seeks no one. It is, by essence, the search for a wisdom that eludes, demands, and charges the newcomer a high price. But it charges in exchange for a revelation that will no longer be allusive and symbolic as in poetry, but literal and direct. So literal and direct that the philosopher can communicate only a small part of it, and sometimes nothing.

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, an occupation for lovers willing to pay with their life the price of their conquest, poetry is, in contrast, the love that wisdom has even for men who do not love it, and who, careless and scattered, cannot escape receiving at least a little of it, forced to do so by the body, which cannot escape the fascination of harmony and rhythm.

Philosophy is the search for wisdom; poetry is wisdom in search of men. That’s all, and there is no more difference. They are like the two columns of the temple, Rigor and Mercy — what wisdom demands, what wisdom grants. For this reason, they can neither completely disagree nor identify completely. Neither can philosophy cease to be a poetry that has receded to the state of inner experience, nor can poetry cease to be philosophy in nuce.

For the same reason, philosophy, unlike poetry, is never fully in the work, but half in the philosopher himself: the bearer of knowledge is the man, not the book. The book, the treatise, the lecture, is never more than the condensation of knowledge into a few general principles and its exemplification in a few samples; and knowledge, true knowledge, takes shelter in that living core of intelligence that remains in the depths of the author’s soul after the book is closed, and that will know how to give these principles other and limitless incarnations and different, unpredictable, surprising, or even paradoxical applications, according to the ungraspable variety of the situations of existence. Only in St. Thomas resided the wisdom of St. Thomas. We can only be Thomists, which is a dehydrated and diminished St. Thomas.

However, I do not completely deny the possibility of putting into a book the essential of what a man knows and sees. I just think that one cannot fully unload the content of that personal vision into explicit theses, because they are only the crystallized residue of an inner decantation that, far from being the mere preparation for their advent, is rather the exercise of philosophy itself. Now, this exercise, which takes place over time and has a real human individual as its subject (albeit having, on the other hand, the universal reach of a symbol), can only be represented in an artistic form.

If the philosopher wants to be understood, he must therefore bring to paper not only the explicit content of the theses he has reached, whether furnished with extensive proofs and examples or not, but also something of the inner atmosphere in which they were born and developed; an atmosphere that can only be reconstituted through narration, drama, and poetry. However, it is not a matter of writing novels, dramas or poems that allegorically translate our ideas, as literary art, by itself, cannot escape its commitment to metaphorical language and declare explicitly the philosophical theses it adheres to – a declaration that would render superfluous the narrative or poem that accompanies, surrounds or precedes it. Even less would it be fitting to argue literarily, replacing the force of proofs with the charm of images, suggesting instead of affirming, seducing instead of proving.

The philosophical book, in essence, must possess at the same time, articulated and distinct in a clear harmony, the clarity and demonstrability of a scientific thesis, and the immersive suggestiveness of a poetic work, without falling into the impersonal schematism of the former or the multisensory haze of the latter. Squeezed between these conflicting demands, the writing of a philosophy book – at least for those who are aware of them – can present formidable difficulties, which is why I have preferred speaking over writing, although I do not find writing repulsive at all. This preference is further emphasized by the fact that, among one’s students, as a professor, there exists a present and living atmosphere without the need to imitate it through verbal artifice.

It is practically impossible, moreover, for a philosopher’s written production to rigorously keep up with the evolution of their doctrine and teaching, if they aim to meet the requirements of good style. Poets and novelists may exhaust the best of their inspiration in their written works; they may even exceed the limits of it, and start repeating themselves, faltering, and striving for effect in a futile and vain eagerness.

The essence of an artist is contained in one or two books; the rest of their written works are uneven, a decline. This is because poetic inspiration is essentially a happy agreement between the projected intention and the concrete verbal form, and if this agreement is only achieved at certain moments, the rest of the written work is a sketch, not a masterpiece. On the other hand, philosophical inspiration is essentially that of an eidetic form not intrinsically associated with any specific verbal expression. Intrinsically, I say: accidentally, such an association may exist, and it may happen that certain sections of a philosopher’s work occur to them already embodied in a felicitous, even ingenious and sublime verbal expression; however, these do not necessarily have to be the best or most important parts of their philosophy. At no point does Plato’s verbal genius reach the splendor of the Phaedrus; yet, what value do the philosophical concepts of the Phaedrus hold when compared to the unfathomable depth and almost divine altitude of certain passages in the Laws or the Timaeus, though scarcely remarkable in literary expression?

Even when the verbal form is perfect and embodies the idea without exceeding it or leaving anything lacking, this does not necessarily result in literary beauty, fluent reading, or plastic clarity of expression. Perhaps the most perfect masterpiece of philosophical analysis in the last three centuries is Felix Ravaisson’s Of Habit: thirty pages ascending from biology to psychology, from psychology to the theory of knowledge and metaphysics without a leap, without a fault, without a hesitation. However, there are so many dissonant sounds and convoluted phrases therein that, judged strictly by literary criteria, the text would be considered obscure and poorly crafted. Yet, its perfection lies in the fact that any attempt to revise it for literary purposes would lead to confusion in the connections of concepts, a lowering of the level of abstraction, and a decrease in the value of the argument.

The only philosopher in the history of thought who claimed to have exhausted in writing all that he wanted to say was Henri Bergson, and his work is marvelously written, clear and musical throughout. But it is acknowledged that Bergson’s philosophical universe is rather meager, monothematic, a theme with a certain number of variations, which the author had the wisdom to stop when approaching saturation. The same can be said of Croce. Furthermore, literary clarity in Bergson (not in Croce) is sometimes achieved at the cost of conceptual nebulousness, which becomes evident when the reader, piercing through the verbal curtain, presses the philosopher for his ultimate proofs.

Leibniz, in general, is a sober and elegant prose writer, even in his drafts. But the nearly universal misinterpretation of his ideas is due to the fact that they became known mainly through his best-written works – the Theodicy and the New Essays on Human Understanding – without examining the less artistic pages of the Discourse on Metaphysics, the Monadology, and the numerous Essays and Letters, where the philosopher, addressing an elite circle of wise men, allowed himself that brevity which Horace said was opposed to clarity.

Who writes more directly and eloquently than Nietzsche? However, the best of his interpreters, Eugen Fink, trying to reduce his texts to a coherent expression of a system, found not one but five mutually contradictory philosophical systems in them.

And who has been more confused and misinterpreted than the greatest Spanish prose writer since Cervantes? José Ortega y Gasset, a man whom words obeyed like recruits obeying a captain, an artist capable of giving the most abstract ideas a plastic clarity that almost makes them jump off the page to join three-dimensional masses that act and speak, a natural educator for whom “clarity is the courtesy of the philosopher.” Yet, this is the thinker who found the fewest understanding readers. They slid down the slippery slope of his metaphors, he complained, and ended up far from his thoughts.

Finally, it must be considered that, among the three founding fathers of Western philosophy – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – the first wrote nothing, and regarding the other two, only the literary works are known, with the lectures and courses missing from one and the published works from the other, during the author’s lifetime.

This double and inverse gap has, like Socrates' authorial abstinence, the value of a symbol: the relationship between philosophy and literary expression will always be ambiguous; the clarity of philosophical intuition will never fully or permanently coincide with the clarity of its verbal materialization; and only in a remarkable exception will the philosopher’s finest moments perfectly overlap with the author’s finest moments.

Thus, in the work of a philosopher, there are hardly any minor texts, truly said to be such, dispensable in their entirety for understanding their doctrine, as in the works of poets; on the contrary, there are always two or three summits that shine alone without any support from secondary texts, and perhaps they would shine even more if the rest of their written work were lost. Did anything of The Waste Land get lost when its drafts were published with the passages cut by Pound’s hand? How much clearer and more brilliant, as a whole, did Aristotle’s thought become when his Poetics, lost for nearly two millennia, was rediscovered in 1548? And how much more consistent and firm did the structure of Platonism become when reviewed in light of the oral teaching of the master, undertaken by comparing testimonies by the historian Giovanni Reale?

The work of a poet consists of their poems, especially their best poems. The work of a philosopher is not contained in their writings. They are merely evidence, a sign. The work lies in what is called the philosophema, the ideal system of intuitions and thoughts hidden behind the texts – a system that the texts reflect irregularly and unequally, sometimes with missing parts, and can only be contemplated by those who reconstruct it.

As a consequence, the study of philosophers' minor writings, such as letters, drafts, interviews, and transcriptions of lectures, holds an interest that goes far beyond the strictly biographical interest such similar writings have for the study of poets and novelists. That’s because they are an intrinsic part of the work, and not just preparation and rehearsal for the possible work.

Therefore, it is not important for a philosopher to personally write down their ideas or for them to be conveyed in a personal and distinctive literary style. Socrates is only known through what his disciples noted down from his spoken words. Hegel’s Aesthetics and Lectures on the History of Philosophy are almost entirely the notes of his students. And how poorly would we know Husserl’s thought if it were not for works like Experience and Judgment, entirely written by his disciple Fink in his personal and characteristic language!

Any text, written by anyone, that a philosopher approves as an adequate expression of their thoughts — or that, even without explicit approval, may be of the value of a reliable testimony — must be considered an integral part of their work, insofar as they help to shape the philosopheme in which it essentially consists. However, the philosopheme is not only realized in an ideal system of abstract theses, but also in the concrete personal attitudes with which the philosopher has given it a living interpretation in the face of the situations of existence: Socrates' haughtiness in the face of death is the concrete exemplification of Socratic ethics, which we would understand differently, in a more figurative and less strict way, if its author had shown weakness before his executioners.

We are here again at the antipodes of literary history, where biographical details should be abstracted to give way to a direct interpretation of the texts. The level of responsibility that the artist and the philosopher (or the mystic, or the man of science) must have before what they write is different. A poet or novelist, by definition, does not have to believe in what he writes, except at the moment when he writes. Once the creative ecstasy is over, he can take all that as a hallucination, a game, a minute of pleasure detached from the stream of life, and go on to take care of the “real life” while continuing to receive the applause and the proceeds from the past moment. This is why we still pay attention to Rimbaud’s poetry, even knowing that he renounced it to become a arms smuggler, one of the most useful and practical activities in the realm of this world.42

But what would become of the mystic who, after the ecstasy of the vision of God, denied his faith, or of the philosopher who, once the moment of the intuition of truth has dissipated, did not try to remain faithful to it in his subsequent acts and words? Wouldn’t such attitudes be immediately alleged by the opponents of his religion or his philosophy as implicit proofs of their falsity? They would be, at the very least, betrayals.

In a philosopher or a mystic, even a small lapse in conduct, a slight deviation from his explicit morality, a moment of distraction that takes him away from the proclaimed truth, scandalizes us. Even more: the fact of the deviation, duly fitted by posterity into the evolutionary sequence of the philosopher’s inner biography, will be used as the basis for entire reinterpretations of his thought: there is a Heidegger before and after the revelation of his Nazi romance, as there is a Sartre before and after his embarrassments of May '68.

This is not to say, of course, that biography can or should be the main key to understanding a philosopher’s thought. On the contrary: wherever the oral or written lessons bequeathed to us by the philosopher are not sufficient to demonstrate in themselves the unity of the central intent that moves his thought, it is certainly because this unity does not exist, because we are facing the formless traces of a thought that is searching and not finding itself. And it will be a vain endeavor to try to find, in the biography, the unity that the words do not reveal. Because, if it did not express itself in words, the intent did not get to be thought in words, but only perhaps confusingly sensed fragmentarily in scattered moments, without taking form in self-consciousness.

This unity that remained merely potential would be a philosophy in potency; but a philosophy in potency is not a philosophy, for the simple reason that the potency, not yet having the form that would convert it into act, would preserve in itself, like everything that is only germ and promise, the possibility of developing in multiple and contradictory directions, that is, of generating opposing philosophies. Even more, the vaguely sensed unity, if it could not manifest itself in the form of the concept,43 remained condensed in symbol. Matrix of possible philosophies, it is not any philosophy. It is, in the full sense of the word, poetry. And poetry, as much as it may influence and inspire philosophers, is not part of the original philosophical project, which essentially includes the intent to make the symbol explicit and to operate, among the possible understandings it generates, the triage of the true and the false. Therefore poetry enters the history of philosophy only as an external factor and possible matter of the philosophical work, matter without philosophical form, it being certain and true that the essence is in the form and that everything (from religious experience and sciences to simple life experience) can serve as matter to the form which, raising it to the level of the explicit concept44 and self-conscious, will make it philosophy and nothing else.

It is extremely serious, therefore, that, not finding in the work of a Nietzsche any unity other than biographical and psychological,45 he continues to be taken as a philosopher instead of admitting that he is a poet and nothing more, that is, a man who does not intend his words to be taken unambiguously, for the simple reason that he himself does not know, and admits that he does not know, in which of the possible unambiguous meanings they could be true, and in which false. It is true that Nietzsche himself, here and there, insists on the unity of philosophy and biography, but he does so foreseeing that he himself can only be understood through biography, which results in admitting the symbolic, allusive and multi-sense character of his own words and his inability to explain them to judge them philosophically.

It is not, therefore, in the Nietzschean sense that my appeal to the unity of philosophy and biography should be understood, for, in the sense in which I understand it, biographical understanding remains an auxiliary element and only this, to the extent that the higher synthesis in which expressed philosophy consists is an element of spiritual biography that could in no case be reduced, as Nietzsche proposes, to empirical and psychological biography. What I am saying is that the philosophical text is necessarily incomplete, always needing a little to be supplemented by biographical elements, and not that the unity and key of a philosophy are always and only in the psychology of an individual, which would plunge all philosophical understanding into a radical psychological immanentism, omitting the commitment to universality that is at the very root of philosophizing and sweeping under the rug the fact that any psychological concepts, including those used by Nietzsche, participate in this commitment and would eat themselves by the tail, losing all validity and explanatory force, at the moment when they were reduced to mere expressions of the individual psyche that created them.

As for poetry, what I say to distinguish it from philosophy is that, among all the creative activities of the spirit, the artistic and literary one requires the least personal commitment to its content: what art demands of the artist is devotion to the work to create it, not fidelity to it, once it is done. Hence, the successive yeses and nos in a poetic work (and in the poet’s life) do not invalidate it, inasmuch as they can sometimes even strengthen the suggestiveness and fertility of the symbol.

What would we say, by comparison, of the scientist who, having presented his discovery, would try to ignore it and not take responsibility for it in the course of his subsequent work? Or of the philosopher who, having published his theory of knowledge, gave us in turn a metaphysics completely disconnected from it, and hoped to get applause for his creative fertility?

No: the relationship of the artist with the finished work is one of total independence; that of the philosopher, scientist, theologian, and mystic, is one of responsibility and continuity. The artist, upon publishing his creations, frees himself from them. The thinker carries them like the cross of his destiny: whether to defend them, or to renounce them, he will always have to have them in front of his eyes, to establish in the past the acts of the present. The infamous life of a poet is redeemed by his writings; the infamous acts of a philosopher are the condemnation of his written work. And far from my thought will the reader be who understands all this as a mere moralistic appeal to coherence between acts and works; for I do not say that this coherence must exist, but that it necessarily exists, for better or worse, and that is why the acts of a philosopher must be incorporated into his philosophy as operational interpretations that the thinker gave to his own thought when translating them from the generality of ideas to the particularity of situations; therefore, in philosophy, biographical studies are not external and subsequent as in literature, but an integral part, albeit auxiliary, of the understanding of the philosopheme; the life of the philosopher stands to his philosophy as jurisprudence stands to codes.

The deep reason for this lies in the very nature of philosophy, which, as the distinguished Igino Petrone taught,

è una visione del mondo in termini d’intelligibilità ed è fondazione della possibilità dell’esperienza. È, quindi, di sua natura, una sintesi espirituale dell’esperienza, una ideale composizione e deduzione della medesima, una intuizione della natura intima delle cose e delle relazioni, ossia del loro nascimento ideale dalla virtù operosa dello spirito, una illuminazione impressa e derivata sui prodotti della consapevolezza dello spirito produttore, un ritorno dello spirito sulla sua interiorità produttiva.46

Being the locus par excellence of the reunion between experience and self-awareness, how could philosophy exclude from itself the acts of the philosopher, precisely those that emanate from the very spirit that judges them philosophically by calling them back to itself? Inner unification of experience, philosophy excludes nothing; and, not being able to say everything, the philosopher leaves much implied in his human attitudes, legible to those who know how to read them.

10. Towards a Philosophical Anthropology

The most general and permanent human condition, the fixed structure behind all local and historical variation, can be summed up in six basic questions, articulated in three axes of polarities, whose attempts at answers, these indeed temporal and variable, provide the coordinates of man’s orientation in existence.

The first axis is “origin-end”. No one has ever known where and when the set of reality began, nor how or when it will end. One can risk a theory of the eternity of the world, a cosmogonic myth, or the image of the big bang, a theology of creation, or materialist atomism, each with its respective explanation of the end. None of these has ever obtained universal acceptance. What cannot be ignored is the question, for it determines our sense of orientation in time, the possibility of conceiving projects, and of giving narrative form to our experiences.

The second axis is “nature-society”. Every man lives between two fields of reality, one prior to and independent of human action, the other created by it. The difference and articulation of these fields appear in the contrast between the geometrism of the circular hut and the formless thicket, in Lévi-Strauss’s opposition between the raw and the cooked, in the instinct to seek the protection of the group against animals and weather or, conversely, in the Rousseauian dream of finding in nature a refuge against the evils of social coexistence. Nature can appear as a fearsome nightmare or as a welcoming maternal bosom. Society can be home or prison, brotherhood or war. One can make of nature a kind of social order, as in ancient cosmobiology, or naturalize society, as in evolutionary anthropology. But these attempts only reveal the impossibility, whether of explaining one of the terms by its opposite, or of articulating them in a definitive equation, or of understanding one of them without reference to the other.

The third axis is “immanence-transcendence”. Every human being knows that he himself exists, that he has an inner “world” of experiences, memories, desires, fears. But he also knows that this well is bottomless, that no one can fully understand or ignore oneself, that each soul finds something strange and frightening within itself, that each person knows and unknows almost as much as the others. We seek in our intimacy shelter against the wickedness of others, just as we seek in the other, in the friend, in the wife, protection against our inner ghosts. Each one of us is close and strange to oneself. On the other hand, beyond all that can be known of reality, beyond all achievable experience, every man and every culture senses an “x” factor, which, from above or from the bottom of the flow of events, makes things be what they are and not otherwise. "Why is there being and not rather nothing?": so Schelling formulated the supreme question. We can try to answer it by conceiving of a metaphysical absolute, of an ordering deity, or of a fantastic self-regulation of coincidences. We can even expel it from public discussion, leaving it to the mercy of private arbitrariness, with the abject intellectual cowardice of modern agnosticism. But even then we know that we do not escape from it. Between immanence and transcendence, various articulations are possible, but none satisfactory. We can conceive the transcendent in the image of our inner being, as a benevolent deity who understands and loves us – but this will highlight even more the strangeness and demonic hostility of life. We can imagine it with the impersonal and mechanical traits of a mathematical formula – but this will not prevent us from cursing or blessing fate, implying in it a human intentionality when it oppresses or comforts us.

Each of the poles is a question, a mix of ignorance and knowledge, a focus of spiritual tensions. Each one articulates with its opposite, in a mutual clarification – or multiplication – of tensions. And at the point of intersection of the three axes, like that of the three directions of space, fixed in the structure of reality like Christ on the cross, is the human being.

Beliefs, worldviews, doctrines, differ mainly by the hierarchy they establish among the six factors through assimilations and reductions. Many archaic cultures privileged the “origin” factor, explaining society and nature by a cosmogonic myth, ignoring transcendence and immanence. Medieval scholasticism referred to transcendence, dreaming of being able to deduce from it a complete and definitive intellectual order. Modernity absorbed everything in the nature-society opposition, hoping no less utopically to reduce the mysteries of transcendence and imanence, of origin and end, to questions of subatomic particles, genetic code, and linguistic analysis. It thus prepared the advent of totalitarian ideologies that made society the ultimate reason for origin and end, bracketing nature, suffocating immanence, and barring access to transcendence. Each of these arrangements, even the most limiting, is legitimate and functional as a provisional experiment, as a probe in a certain direction that the interests of a moment have emphasized. It becomes alienating and oppressive when it crystallizes into a prohibition to look beyond the admitted articulation. Only the openness of the soul to the simultaneity of the six poles, with their lights and shadows, gives access to the realistic experience of the human condition and, therefore, to the possibility of wisdom. All explanations that, to emphasize a particular articulation, deny or suppress the structure of the whole, are false or sterile.

Philosophies such as Marxism, positivism, pragmatism, the analytic school, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, deconstructionism – all those that occupy the entire space of academic teaching in this country – are spiritual diseases, obsessions that hypnotically enclose us in the fascination of an answer while erasing the frame of reference that gives meaning to the question.

O Globo, July 19, 2003.

11. The Absent Question

Weeks ago, I presented to readers my idea that the position of the human being in the structure of reality is defined by six limit-questions, which neither find satisfactory answers nor remain entirely unanswered, and which in their content are arranged in three pairs of opposites, forming a system of tensions. I have been working on this theme for a long time, using, to give it the proper articulation, some concepts already thoroughly deepened by philosophical tradition. The general idea of limit-questions is from Eric Voegelin. “Tension” is a term I use in the sense defined by Mário Ferreira dos Santos in his “General Theory of Tensions,” an unpublished manuscript that I am preparing for publication with notes and comments. The cross disposition came from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Raymond Abellio, but I had to modify it to be useful to my scheme. The formulation of each of the six questions is also not pure invention: it summarizes a multitude of diverse expressions that have been given to them by philosophers since Plato.

In short, the scheme is not a beautiful idea that I suddenly had, but the result of a long investigative work. In the entire journey, as well as in the final scheme obtained, the main question, which articulates the other five and gives the scale of their significance, is evidently the question of transcendence. Its most classical formulation is from Leibniz: "Why does being exist and not rather nothing?". Albert Einstein said that only continuous attention to this question puts human intelligence in the right perspective. When we abandon the question of the ultimate foundation of being (and therefore of knowledge), science itself loses the substance of its rationality and dismantles into senseless questions with arbitrary answers. The loss of the rationality of the sciences was brilliantly described by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences (1933) and it is at the root of the great historical catastrophes of the 20th century. Its origin dates back to the mechanistic mathematics of the Renaissance, but it is not inappropriate to say that evil only acquires alarming proportions with the advent of the two great messianic ideologies of the 19th century, positivism and Marxism, closed circle schemes that forbid questions about everything beyond their frame of reference.

Hence we get an important suggestion for the diagnosis of Brazilian spiritual misery. Positivism and Marxism were the dominant influences in the formation of our intellectuals, which is why they suffer from a chronic narrowing of their horizon of interests. For years I have been reading the main Brazilian books, and I noticed that the fundamental question was absent in almost all of them, in contrast to an obsessive dedication to superficial and transient problems of a sociological, psychological, political, and economic nature. With exceptions that became even more notable for their rarity (a Machado de Assis, a Jorge de Lima, a Mário Ferreira, a Bruno Tolentino, for example), Brazilian intelligence moved in a local sphere alien to the highest spiritual interest of humanity. Even our vast literature of religious inspiration generally did not go beyond moral and pastoral concerns, easily degenerated, from the 1960s on, into pure political preaching. And in recent years it would already be an exaggeration to call “politics” what is seen in this country: only show business and propaganda remain.

In my sphere of direct experience, I can assure you that, throughout life, I have not met more than two or three Brazilians for whom the question about the foundation of being, or any of the other five, considered on the scale of this matrix question, had the reality of a decisive personal interest. Even in academic philosophy circles, which should deal with them professionally, the attraction they awaken is remote and indirect: one thing is to wrestle with an essential problem, another is entirely different is scholastic attention to works of fashionable philosophers who, by chance, dealt with it. So much so that Leibniz’s interrogation only enters our academic literature through the bias of Heidegger, who, at least on this point, is second-hand (actually third, since he inherited the question from Schelling and not directly from Leibniz). The interest, in this case, is in “Heidegger,” not in the foundation of being. The approach is scholarly, bookish, not philosophical. What is called a philosopher, in these circles, is not the man who wrestles with the nuclear enigmas of existence: it is the “specialist” in the works of so-and-so, known to the last details of textual analysis. The “text” is everything; the problems and reality, nothing. The cult of futility reaches, there, the proportions of a sin against the spirit. And it still hides behind the ennobling pretext of a disciplinary austerity, which refrains from dealing with philosophical problems directly out of zeal for philological scrupulousness.

When you look at Brazilian society and notice its panorama of corruption, chaos, violence, and general disorientation, please remember that this state of affairs may have causes that go beyond the political and economic surface of the day. Remember that a culture without interest in the foundation can only, in the long run, create a society devoid of foundations, a building of dear frivolities that, at the first stronger wind, falls like a house of cards.

O Globo, October 18, 2003.

II. Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations

Preface by José Enrique Barreiro

He is not part of the large and clamorous modern cultural crowd. He prefers silent work, often more fruitful. He is aware of the traps of success set by the system and chooses to pass by its lures. Despite his discretion and silence, the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho has been producing a deafening body of work for twenty years.

An incessant critic of the darkening of intelligence that darkens our days, Olavo has reduced to dust, in his texts and classes, the dominant intellectual production, incapable of shedding the slightest light on any point of our being.

Indifferent to the recognition of academic elites and the applause of the cultural show business world, he has chosen full intellectual life as his ambition and daily exercise. Understand: not the intellectual life that is valuable for how much it produces, but the one that hounds the truth with all possible strength and desire.

In this daily struggle for truth, he discovered that the real actor of learning and the development of culture is the human individual and not collectivities. “One philosopher capable of encompassing all the problems of the culture and society of his time is worth more than a legion of doctors capable of perceiving each a piece, without having the means or even the language to communicate it to others,” he says in the document presenting his most cherished project: the Institute of Liberal Arts (IAL). There, instead of trying to solve in everyone a small piece of the problem – as the crowd of collectivist bureaucrats do – he undertakes another type of pedagogical effort, aimed at trying to solve the entire problem in a few, however few they may be.

Thus, inspired by the Liberal Arts system, which dominated the formation of Western culture for almost two thousand years, Olavo de Carvalho resumes, in the IAL, the humanist perspective in an attempt to help return to his students individual consciousness, without which it is impossible to recompose the unity of knowledge and being.

His new text, The Literary Genres, in which he presents the metaphysical foundations of the predominant genres in the history of literature, should, like the others, make noise. Not that he, inhabitant of constructive silence, intends to cause a commotion. But the power of knowledge and the power of truth tend to indiscriminately dynamite stone or cloud spirits, open or locked heads, armed or defenseless hearts.

Author’s Note to the First Edition (1991)

The text of this booklet consists of four classes, delivered in April 1987, in the course Introduction to Intellectual Life. The oral presentation added comments and developments, which are omitted here, but of which one can get an idea from the notes that accompany it.

Now revisiting, four years later, this little work as full of good intention as of flaws, I noticed at least two, which, if they cannot be completely remedied, should at least be confessed.

The first is the use of that form of plural that some call “modest”, and others, “majestic”, a habit that I have since dropped.

The second is that the concept of “number”, central to my presentation, was vague and nebulous. Perhaps the following clarifications will help to specify it: the number, as I understand it here, is at the same time quantity (or pure qualitatively indeterminate nexus, as Husserl defined it in his Philosophy of Arithmetic) and also form, or qualitative number as understood by the Pythagoreans.47 In the latter sense, the number can also be synonymous with “order” and “relationship” (or “system of relations”).

In the text, I switch between these senses with great nonchalance and without prior notice. I know that I explain it, but I do not justify it, by saying that I did it this way because the text was originally directed to a group of my students, who, accustomed to the polysemic use of this term, were not expected to have, in each case, the slightest difficulty in making the due transpositions.

I thank Ana Maria Santos Peixoto for the invaluable assistance provided to the edition of this booklet.

Rio de Janeiro, August 1991.

1. Statement of the Problem

The first reason we might have for believing that literary genres exist is that many authors, like Aristotle and Boileau, wrote treatises to expound the rules that define them.

The second reason is that these rules have been followed by thousands of writers for centuries, and therefore, we can find works that exemplify the classic conception of lyric, tragedy, etc., in a perfectly accurate way.

The first reason we might have for believing that literary genres do not exist is that there is an equally large number of works, ancient and modern, but especially modern, that do not fit perfectly well into any of the genres defined by the treatises.

The second reason is that some authors, such as the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, say they do not exist48. According to these authors, what only exists are individual works, which history records, and that the theorist can, a posteriori, barely group together by their similarities and differences, which, being in turn as numerous and varied as the works themselves, do not manage to align themselves into constant and distinct groups that could bear the label of “genres”.

The third reason is that many authors, knowing the two previous reasons, decided to write works that deliberately escape the constraints of all known genres. With this, the exception has become the rule and the rule has become the exception; and the systematic confusion that followed seemed to give ample confirmation to Croce’s argument.

The question of genres is similar to the dispute of realism and nominalism: do universal concepts express realities that exist by themselves, extra mentis, or are they just a mental gathering of common characteristics that a more or less fortunate chance has allowed us to discern in various individual beings? Are universals “real beings” or mere “beings of reason”? Does horsehood exist or do only horses exist? Does triangularity exist or do only triangles exist? In the same way: are literary genres universal and necessary structures underlying all possible literary invention, or are they mere formal conventions established by habit, convenience, if not by pedantry?

2. Some Modern Opinions

Some modern theorists lean toward compromise solutions. In their now classic work, Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren assert that

the literary species is an ‘institution’, just as the Church, the university or the State are institutions: it exists, not as an animal exists, or even as a building, a chapel, a library, or a capitol exists, but rather as an institution exists. Man can act and express himself through existing institutions, create new institutions or rely on them, without sharing their rules or rituals; he can also participate in them, but then give them a new form… The theory of genres is a principle of order: it classifies literary history and literature… by specifically literary types of organization or structure… Do literary genres remain fixed? Probably not.49

This has the merit of distinguishing between a physical, individual modality of existence, and a non-physical, or “institutional” one, cataloging genres in the latter. It is certainly better than declaring that genres do not exist after having looked for signs of their existence where they could not be found. But, fundamentally, this distinction is nothing other than the same as that between individual works and literary genres – between horses and horse-ness –, merely changing the names. Individual works exist as animals and buildings do; genres, as zoological research institutes and architecture colleges do. This does not at all explain where genres come from, nor whether they emanate from an inherent need in the real order of things or from a simple human desire for systematization and convenience. The problem remains: to know the origin and value of zoological institutes, it is not enough to have noted that they are not a type of animal.

The Brazilian critic Massaud Moisés, who gives a fairly up-to-date review of this debate, gets a bit closer to the solution by saying that genres are born “from a kind of natural imposition, something like the individual’s adaptation to the cosmic rhythm, marked by an unalterable regularity”.50 But, although he clarifies that “the reiteration of an expressive module obeys an innate human tendency towards order”, and although he cites in his support Emil Staiger, for whom genres “represent fundamental possibilities of human existence in general”,51 he does not explain what this “something” consists of, nor what the intrinsic relationship of genres with the cosmic rhythm is. And the “thing”, being so vague and imprecise, does not offer the slightest resistance to Prof. Moisés, lines later, writing that genres “were invented by certain writers”, apparently without realizing that he falls into contradiction. Indeed, if it were as he says, we would have to believe that, until someone had the providential kindness to invent the genres, all writers lived outside the cosmic rhythm, which would be quite disastrous.

It is therefore clear that we must distinguish between the “cosmic phenomenon” of genres – the innate human tendency to reiterate certain expressive modules, in obedience to an implacable natural regularity – and the formal concept or verbal definition of genres, which simply expresses in logical language the at least apparent consistency of this phenomenon.

The concept, the verbal definition, may have been invented by men, but the phenomenon itself, if it comes from nature, was not “invented” by anyone, unless the phrase is referring to God or unless the verb “invent” is given the original meaning of the Latin invenire – “discover”, “find” –, stripping it of all connotation of creation and artificial construction. And the problem under discussion is precisely to determine whether the concept of genres, as expressed by “certain writers”, actually depicts a real relationship between human expressive modules and cosmic regularity, or if, on the contrary, genres are a set of arbitrary rules, a being of reason with no fundamentum in re.

If the relationship exists, genres are a necessity, a “constant of the human spirit”; and the fact that people occasionally write books that do not fit into this or that genre does not deny the existence of genres, just as the existence of diseases does not deny the laws of physiology, but rather demonstrates them by the proof a contrario: no matter how hidden and disguised they may be under dense layers of inventive or extravagant combinations, genres will always continue to be the fundamental principles of all literary composition. If, conversely, the relationship does not exist, then genres do not reflect any cosmological or ontological need, and are just a rule invented based on the tastes of a certain time, which we can follow or abandon at will, with no risk of subverting the cosmic order.

The whole problem boils down, therefore, to knowing whether there are ontological or cosmic laws from which genres constitute an extension, a manifestation or expression at the level of the linguistic and literary microcosm, or if there are not.

3. The Mode of Existence of Genres

In our understanding, these laws exist; and the mode of existence of genres, if it does not resemble that of animals, also does not resemble at all that of the “institutions”, contingent and more or less conventional, of human society. Genres exist, not as the Rotary Club or the municipal budget exists, but as the laws of logic exist. These laws, in themselves, are immutable, but they lend themselves to an indefinite number of applications and combinations, some of which can lead to perfectly illogical results. The fact that people make incorrect reasoning does not prove that they are thinking “without” logic; it only proves that they think poorly with logic and everything; that they do not know how to handle the laws of reasoning, from which, however, they cannot escape, because, if they could, their illogical reasoning could never be challenged as wrong, since there would be no criterion for correct reasoning; and, in fact, the study of incorrect reasoning is part of the science of logic.

Literary genres neither exist “in themselves”, as substances in the scholastic sense of the term, nor are they a posteriori generalizations obtained from more or less fortuitous similarities between individual works, nor are they rules dictated by the arbitrary taste of an era. They are schemes of possibilities52 for the organization of texts. Their mode of existence and action consists in that they delimit the possibilities of literary invention, differentiating it into a certain number of directions or orientations which, once taken, necessarily entail certain consequences for the subsequent development of the work, restricting the field of the author’s arbitrary decision; and the ability that he possesses to deal with these consequences without deviating from his central objective then produces a final standard of internal coherence, which is the means by which we can come to judge the work by its own laws, freely chosen by the author within the range of possible genres and their combinations.

We can say that genres exist and differ from each other like the directions of space. If a man goes to the North, he necessarily moves away from the South; and although he can go back and forth as many times as he wants, the North will continue in the opposite direction to the South, and perpendicular to East and West. The layout of the path depends on each one’s freedom, but it is necessarily marked by extreme directions. The genres are thus the extreme differences between the various possibilities of literary structuring; as we advance coherently in one of these lines of direction, it becomes more difficult – but not impossible – to combine it with others: the more closely committed to the rules of a particular genre the essential construction nucleus of a work is, the more difficult it will be, in the composition of the rest, to escape these rules or combine them creatively and efficiently with those of any other genre. It is like in a game of chess: once a direction of play is defined, it requires increasing skill to revoke the consequences that in the coherent line of causes threaten to follow inexorably after each new move.53

The artist’s skill lies in either following the rules of the chosen direction coherently to the end, or in intelligently combining them with other possible directions,54 forming mixed tissues. However, even in the richest and most inventive mixture, the laws of the genres would always remain active, at least latently, as articulating principles and minimal elements that make up the mixture.

But the emphasis of Wellek and Warren on the difference between the mode of existence of individual works and that of genres can still yield something. Individual works are entities, or substances, produced by man. They exist because they were written, and only exist after being written. Genres, on the other hand, are schemes of possibilities, and, as such, exist before and independently of whether anyone does anything at all.

For a possibility to exist, it is enough that it is not impossible – and to be theoretically possible, to escape from absolute impossibility even if by a scant margin of possibility, is surely easier than effectively writing a book, as anyone who has tried to write one knows. For a scheme of possibilities to exist, it is enough that it continues to be sufficiently distinguishable from other schemes; because the mode of existence of a scheme of possibilities consists only in being a sufficiently clear pattern of differentiation between some possibilities and other possibilities; and as long as this difference exists, the scheme exists.

If this is the case, genres are indestructible, no matter how many mixed works are written and how difficult it becomes, in practice, to distinguish them amidst the mixtures. Only the absolute impossibility – theoretical and not just practical – of distinguishing them would then authorize us to talk about the “non-existence of genres”. But this, obviously, is not going to happen, because genres derive from a need that surpasses the very “cosmic” level: they derive from an ontological need, that is, from the conditions that mark and determine the physical cosmos taken as a whole; and their suppression, if it were possible, would really result in a dangerous cosmic upheaval. It is no coincidence that the difficulty in defining genres and the consequent proclamation of their extinction have peaked in an era that cultivates all sorts of eschatological omens.

4. Ontological Foundations

The modern pursuit of “interdisciplinarity” often leads us to forget that, for the ancients, all knowledge was always interdisciplinary. They simply could not conceive of “specialized” knowledge, independent of universal principles, through which each science always maintained a network of necessary relations with all other sciences, whether they were neighboring, superior, or subordinate.

To correctly understand even the smallest and most particular of the concepts of Aristotelian, scholastic, Chinese, or Islamic science, it is necessary to refer it back to the universal, metaphysical principles that underpin it, and from which it is never more than an explanation or illustration in a specialized and limited domain.55 Then, it is necessary to know the level, the place of this concept – of the conceptualized thing – in the “great chain of Being”, that is, in the scale of planes of reality that descend from the Absolute to the most particular and contingent domains of experience. The admission of metaphysical principles in all sciences and a cosmology that divides the universe into an indefinite number of concentric planes or spheres are features present in all ancient or traditional cultures.

If we do not take this into account, any concept of ancient science that we study floats in space as a gratuitous and unexplainable enigma, arbitrary creation of a barbaric and primitive mind that would make science a slave to taste and fantasy. And obviously we do not believe that our contemporaries are the first intelligent people to appear on the face of the Earth, or that the fact of having come after the ancients authorizes us to a feeling of superiority that our feats do not justify at all. Much of the modern attitude towards genres comes only from ignorance of their ontological foundations in ancient science.

The metaphysical principle par excellence is that of the Absolute, or Infinite, or Universal Possibility. The Infinite – as we will call it from now on – is a necessarily unique principle (as two infinites cannot be conceived), unlimited in all directions, necessary by definition (since a contingent infinite would be a limited infinite, therefore finite). We speak of the metaphysical Infinite and not of a supposed “mathematical infinite”, which is limited to quantity, and which for this very reason is not an infinite in the proper sense, but only metaphorical, or of second degree: infinitum secundum quid, “infinite under a certain aspect”, as the scholastics used to say.56

The Infinite encompasses and transcends, in its absolutely unlimited possibility, all dimensions and directions of the finite. And finite beings, as they derive from the Infinite, can therefore neither be identical to it nor be radically different from it, i.e., have no point of contact with it. Beings are neither identical nor different from the Infinite: they are analogous to it. The main bond of union between finite beings and the Infinite is the notion of unity, which is a common trait to both. Everything that exists has unity, because if it does not have unity it is two and lacks consistency, cohesion. The attribute “being” and the attribute “unity” are, therefore, said to be mutually convertible: to everything to which being is attributed, unity is attributed, and vice versa. Ens et unum convertuntur. Only that the unity of the Infinite is absolute (because inseparable) and simple (because it is not composed of parts), while that of finite beings is composite (because always constituted of parts or aspects) and relative (because separable, upon the extinction of beings).57

Hence, every finite being, whatever its place in the “great chain of Being,” has, with the Infinite, two types of simultaneous relations: on the one hand, essential continuity, i.e., the ultimate unity of its essence with the essence of the Infinite, for it would be contradictory to conceive of a being whose essence was entirely separate from the Infinite; on the other hand, existential discontinuity, because finite beings, united to the Infinite by their essence, distinguish and separate from it according to their conditions, forms, levels, planes, and modes of existence, which, descending from universality to particularity, from necessity to contingency, from permanence to transitoriness, precisely compose the “great chain of Being”.58

Thus, from the absolute unlimitedness of Universal Possibility, to the most restricted domains of contingent existence, successive degrees of possibility, or “worlds,” are staggered. Each of these worlds is therefore defined by a set of limitations, or conditions, that dictate what, in their own domains, is possible or impossible.

What we call “our world,” the world of human sensory experience, is defined by three conditions: time, space, and number or quantity. There is nothing in the whole extent of the physical world that is not subjected to the imperious law that orders to be somewhere, and not elsewhere, during some time, and not more, and to be limited to a certain quantity, in all aspects.59

These limitations, of course, affect not only the beings but also all their actions and manifestations. Thus, human intelligence, although it can even capture in some mysterious, instantaneous and unexpressed way realities that are far above the conditions of time, space, and number (without which it could not understand the notions of “Infinite” or “essence”), will have to submit to these same conditions to be able to manifest itself, or express itself, in the form of thought, speech, or action. Now, the written manifestations of the human mind could not escape these universal conditions, they could not exist without differentiating themselves into patterns delimited according to time, space, and number. These patterns are precisely the principle of genres.

The three “conditions of corporeal existence” mentioned by traditional doctrines and particularly Hindus frame and shape all structures of human perception and action. For this reason, there is not among all the functions of perception and action, none that cannot, in the last instance, be reduced – at least in its logical concept – to a modality of number, space, and time (for example, vision refers to simultaneity, hearing to succession; walking to succession, apprehension to simultaneity; generation to number, etc.). The same inevitably occurs with language. From the basic distinction between the noun (simultaneity) and the verb (succession) to the smallest details of the inflection system, everything refers to combinations and complications obtained from these three principles. Similarly, when man began to put his thoughts in writing, the modalities in which he could do so had to differentiate according to the three conditions of corporeal existence.

5. Verse and Prose

The most general genres that exist, encompassing all others (and thus, being “genres of genres”, could properly be called categories) are verse and prose. The distinction between verse and prose reflects at the level of the human literary microcosm, the condition “number”, or quantity.

Whatever theorists who have been engaged for a hundred years in endless discussions may say, the fact is that the distinction between verse and prose is just a distinction between the two most general forms of quantity: continuous quantity and discontinuous quantity. Continuous quantities are, for example, extension and volume; discontinuous quantities are series, periodicities, sections, etc. Verse is verse while some principle of discontinuity or sectioning predominates in it, be it rhythmic or metric, some kind of sound reiteration; and prose is prose while it flows and does not return. Verses are like raindrops, dripping repeatedly, and prose is a river that runs without interruptions. Hence a certain “superiority” of verse, because it “comes from heaven”, like the discontinuous and enigmatic speech of angels and oracles, while prose slides on the ground like the daily speech of men.

This distinction therefore reflects the principles of essential continuity and existential discontinuity between Infinite and finite.

The traditional symbolism of the circle can illustrate this a bit clearer. If we represent Being, unique and infinite, by a point, the rays that depart from it represent its distinct possibilities of manifestation in various directions; they are the qualities, or properties, that prolong its essence without separating from it. If, starting from this point, we now draw several concentric circles, these represent the various gradations of proximity and distancing that each point and each segment of the rays can have in relation to the central point. The rays represent essential continuity, and the circles, existential discontinuity; the rays, the unity of the real; the circles, the multiplicity of planes or levels.60

This figure applies to the distinction of verse and prose in a dual manner, according to the rule of traditional symbolism that always admits the concomitance of a direct symbolism and an inverse symbolism.61 We can say, on the one hand, that the rays express the continuous flow of prose, and their sectioning by the concentric circles, the rhythm of verse. On the other hand, we can look at the figure in the opposite sense, and say that prose spins or discourses continuously like the stars in their orbits, and that the rays of verse rhythmically section or scan these circles according to the directions of space.

The possible mixtures of different gradations of verse and prose should not obscure the essential distinction, because every mixture, no matter how complex, will always be composed of continuous and discontinuous.

The latest tendency of criticism is to forget the fundamental role of the quantitative factor – metric or rhythmic – in the distinction between prose and verse, and to seek a semantic type of distinction. That is: whether or not it has metric and rhyme, a text is considered “poetic” or “prosaic” according to whether a “connotative” or “denotative” use of the word predominates; verse speaks in modo obliquo and prose in modo recto.62

This new distinction arose from the need to account for a large volume of works of poetic intentions written without commitments to the metric. But, on the one hand, denotation and connotation are nothing more than the semantic equivalents of continuity and discontinuity, as seen by the direct or indirect, continuous or discontinuous reference of the signifier to the signified. On the other hand, it is a derived and secondary distinction, not primary.

For millennia, poetic works had metric and rhyme, whether the connotative or the denotative predominated in them (because treaties of science and philosophy, which we would say are prosaic in the semantic sense, were cast in poetic forms, without anyone finding it strange).

We could admit, to cut the question at the root, a quadruple classification, according to the intersection of phonetic and semantic criteria: thus, there is the continuous-connotative, and the continuous-denotative; the discontinuous-connotative and the discontinuous-denotative; and the gradations of these four will easily account for all possible mixtures, without needing to complicate the question further, which could have been resolved from the outset by noting the equivocal nature of the word “prose”, as opposed, on the one hand, to “verse”, and, on the other, to “poetry”.

But, strictly speaking, according to their origin, verse and prose are not modes of signification, but modes of speech. To avoid further confusion, we will say that a text that is intensely “connotative”, but without any rhythmic or metric reiteration, is not verse: it is poetic prose or something like that: and a purely “denotative” text, like for example certain totally prosaic and informative speeches from the tragedies of Shakespeare and Racine (not to mention the old rhymed treaties of geometry and physics), are verses.

In summary: whether connotative or denotative, the continuous is prose; and the discontinuous, whether connotative or denotative, is verse, “poetic” or not. If you want to change this, preferring to apply the semantic criterion, it won’t make the slightest difference; only, for the sake of clarity, we recommend keeping in mind that the distinction between verse and prose refers primarily to elocution, and secondarily (metaphorically, or secundum quid) to signification; and that when we move from the direct application to the metaphorical application of a concept, adjustments and compensations must be made, avoiding a shallow, mechanical, and unintelligent transposition.

From this point of view, we will see that in theory all literary genres can be cast indifferently in prose or verse (or in different gradations of mixture), and that in fact they often were, according to the taste and preference of the times. If today it seems a little strange to write physics treaties with meter and rhyme, to the Greeks the poetic prose of the symbolists would not seem less strange.

We repeat that the existence of varying degrees of mixture, and even of almost indecomposable mixtures, does not change the general concept at all: the fact that the Northeast is neither North nor East does not suppress the existence of North and East, which must continue where they are for it to be possible for someone to be in the Northeast. The obsessive worship of exceptions – which in the final analysis could always be reduced to the rule, if it was worth the effort – derives from nothing other than the taste for what Ortega y Gasset called “philosophy of the tawny cats”.

Before we enter into the discussion of the genres in particular, we must clarify that the distinction between genres is of a completely different type from that which exists between verse and prose. This difference is twofold:

  1. Verse and prose are distinguished according to number – or order, or relationship -, while literary genres are distinguished as they reflect the categories of space or time and the various modalities of space and time. Verse and prose are “categories”, or genres of genres; they encompass all genres, just as number encompasses space and time.

  2. If genres are bodies of possibilities, and if these bodies are distinct from each other, each body is defined as a principle or rule of structuring the material taken as a whole, while verse and prose are principles of structuring the smallest parts – sentences and periods – taken separately. A tragedy is a tragedy because the totality of the narrated events necessarily converge to a tragic denouement through a sequence according to the rule of tragedy, even though there may be, here or there, along the work, pleasurable or comic elements. But verses are verses because their sentences are sectioned and stitched, one by one, according to some type of repetitive module; and prose is prose because its sentences follow in a continuous flow, without commitment to repetition. To know if a work is written in verse or prose, just read a few paragraphs, or sometimes even take a look at the format of the blot on the page, while, to know if it is comedy or tragedy (if this is not declared on the title page), you need to read the entire work and know the intimate connections between its elements and planes of meaning.

Genres, as we said, are bodies of possibilities for composing literary material, and these bodies differentiate from each other as they reflect, in their internal structure, the other two great dimensions of bodily existence: time and space. Hence the first great division of genres: the temporal or successive mode is expressed in narrative genres, and the spatial, or simultaneous mode, in expository genres. The internal subdivisions of each of these genres – or, if you will, their species – will therefore be defined according to the various modalities of time and space, modalities that, in turn, differentiate by number: continuous and discontinuous. Continuous time (or unending), discontinuous time (or ended): this is the criterion for differentiation between narrative genres. Continuous space (or encompassing totality), discontinuous space (or subdivided into distinct places): this is the criterion for distinction of expository genres.

6. Narrative and Exposition

If, as we said, narrative genres manifest the temporal dimension, they can, in principle, be cast in both prose and verse, precisely because this dimension equally comprises an aspect of continuity and an aspect of discontinuity: time flows irreversibly and uninterrupted, but it is divided by the quantitative and qualitative distinction of its various moments.

Similarly, expository genres can also come in prose or verse, insofar as this reflects the continuous extension or differentiation in dimensions, planes, locations, lines, and points (the point, in geometry, structurally and symbolically coincides with the temporal notion of “moment” and the arithmetic notion of “zero”. It is in this “zero” that the dimensions meet, it is in it that their differentiation begins according to the quantitative patterns of continuity and discontinuity).63

To understand what we are going to say next, keep in mind that these principles of genres are ontological, not psychological; they don’t need to be present in the author’s consciousness when writing the work; they stay, so to speak, behind the act of literary creation, demarcating its field of possibilities. The author who is deeply aware of these principles can, of course, make deliberate use of them as technical elements; but if he has no idea about them, they will nonetheless exercise their delimiting action. It may also happen that the artist aligns with them completely unconsciously, provided that they remain faithful to the formal intent that inspires them: because to make art is to give form, and man can only give form according to his own way of existing, perceiving and doing.

We say that the narrative genre expresses the temporal dimension not because all narratives take place in a uniform flow of time, but because – whether it’s a continuous course, intersecting psychological times, back and forth between the past and the present, moments of minimum and indefinite extension taken atomistically, and regardless of the immense variety of ways of treating time in historical or fictional narratives – time is always the most important structural factor of the narrative, which is narrative for this reason and nothing else.

The occasional interference of expository or spatial elements – as happens, for example, in the description of scenarios, character profiles, or even the small philosophical essays that authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky graft into their novels – does not detract from the narrative character of the work; their presence is explained, ultimately, by the fact that there is no other way for man to perceive and represent time except by referring to a spatial frame and any movement within it, as can be perceived, moreover, by anyone who owns a clock. Strictly speaking, there is no “pure narration”, made solely of successiveness, without any reference to space or the simultaneous. Time is time and space is space, but man is man, and in him these two dimensions intersect, articulated by number or order.

Similarly, expository genres are “spatial” in that they reflect the simultaneity of elements in a logical (or ontological, which amounts to the same) hierarchy. The expository genre is shaped by logical order, abstracting, in principle, from the temporal element, from chronological successiveness. But, just as there is no “pure narrative”, there is no “pure exposition”, because the oral or written exposition of an idea, even when this is intuited in a totally simultaneous mode, requires its successive unfolding in the forms of reasoning and speech. Here too, the “impurity” comes from the nature of things: being symbols or manifestations of the cosmic dimensions of time and space, the genres could not possess all the notes that define these dimensions, because then they would be identical to them, and not analogous. 64

7. Species of Narrative Genre

Narrative genres then differentiate into species according to internal divisions or modes of temporality. These modes are essentially expressed in verb tenses.

The two main modalities of time are defined by the two forms of quantity: continuous and discontinuous. In almost all ancient languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Greek, for example – verb tenses are divided into two basic forms: one of them expresses continuous verbal action, the course in its pure state, without reference to a precise moment, being a kind of “continuous present”, which speaks of a more or less perennial or cyclic action; the second form expresses a verbal action fixed at a moment in time. These two forms therefore manifest, respectively, continuity and discontinuity.

This division varies widely in different languages, but always follows the same basic pattern. In Greek, for example, there are primary verb tenses and a secondary tense: the primary tenses are the present, past, and future, which locate the action at different moments; the secondary is the aorist, or pure verbal action. In Arabic, the division is more radical and, strictly speaking, only two tenses are admitted: the finished (mádi’), “action finished in remote time, whose result is manifested at the moment”, and the unfinished (mudari), “whose action does not end in the present, continuing in the future”;65 there is also the imperative (’amr), which is completely independent of time. Sanskrit follows a division more or less similar to Greek.

To understand these properties of ancient languages and their consequences for the theory of genres, it is necessary to be familiar with the traditional doctrine of “triple time”, which is found, as it is, with insignificant variations, in the metaphysical teachings of Greece and the East.

According to this doctrine, the relations between being and time are staggered in planes or levels. The highest is eternity, total non-existence of time or any passage, full simultaneity of all moments. It is the plane of metaphysical realities par excellence. Universal Possibility is eternal: transformations that occur at lower levels neither diminish nor alter in the slightest the infinity of the possible.

At the other extreme, at the level of particular and sensible beings, there is temporality, the continuous and irreversible flow of unique events that do not repeat. The past does not return; it is the realm of necessity and destiny, the realm of the factum.

Between these two bands extends the intermediate zone of cyclical time, a realm that, while subject to the passage and ruin, is nevertheless periodically rejuvenated by the restoration of initial possibilities, at the moment when the cycle, closing, also reopens. It is the realm of perennity or everness, the intermediate world of archetypal images, the mundus imaginalis, where mythic figures – like the signs of the Zodiac and the characters of mythological epics – dwell and move according to the laws of the perennial return, expressing in forms apprehensible by human cognitio imaginativa the archetypes that mark the possibilities of the temporal world.66

Eternity is the realm of the divine par excellence, from where descend, through the Logos or divine Intelligence, the determinations that, taking progressively more defined living forms in the funnel of everness, finally crystallize as irreversible facts in the temporal order. Eternity is the fiat; temporality, the factum, and everness the perpetual in fieri.

Structurally, therefore, the narrative must express – not necessarily in its content, nor in its technique, but always in the principle or rule of constitution that allows this technique – either permanence or temporality, because the imperative, the 'amr’, is above the possibility of being narrated, or it can only be so by its image in permanence.

Thus, as temporal order is the realm of particular facts and permanence is the realm of myths and symbols that group these facts into categories referring to Universal Possibility, the first division of narrative genres is the one that exists between factual narratives and symbolic narratives. Factual narratives express what has already happened, what has ended and cannot return. Symbolic narratives express events that, although they can metaphorically be placed in the past (as they indeed must be in modern languages, lacking aorist or mudari), actually represent possibilities destined to reactualize.

This division roughly corresponds to what is imprecisely considered “historical” narrative and “fictional” narrative. We say “imprecisely” because what differentiates these two species is not precisely the real or fictitious nature of the events, but the fact that the reality of the historical narrative resides in the events having effectively occurred in a past moment, whereas the “reality” of the fictional narrative consists in the possibility of psychological reactualization of its symbols during reading.

When Carlyle narrates the death of Louis XV, he wants to make clear that this has already happened and will not happen again. But when the Gospel narrates the death of Christ, what the evangelist has in mind is not the completed fact, but rather the possibility of its ritual reactualization in the soul of the Christian. And the death of Desdemona, which in fact never happened, aims to occur in the soul of the spectator when he watches the play. Now, the death of Christ was a historical fact as much as the death of Louis XV; the difference is that the evangelist speaks of it as a symbol, as a repeatable archetype, and Carlyle speaks only of a past fact. Thus, the Gospel narrative and Carlyle’s are both historical, while Desdemona’s is fictional; but the Gospel and Othello are symbolic narratives, while Carlyle’s book is a factual narrative.

Factual narrative, therefore, encompasses all facts that, belonging to the order of temporality and irreversibility, are narrated as such. This includes testimonial works, chronicles, and memoirs, as well as works of History proper. The difference between memoirs and works of History lies in the interference of a spatial factor, which is the point of view of the narrator. The memoirist tells things from his own point of view, and the historian collects various testimonies (among which he can evidently include his own). We can also introduce a difference, equally spatial, between memoir books and those of testimony or chronicle, because the former narrate from the point of view of the author of the actions, and the latter from the point of view of an observer. Although these divisions are, in principle, spatial, they also have a temporal counterpart, in the differentiation between a subjective or personal temporality and a social chronology – intersubjective, therefore.

Symbolic narrative species also divide according to the continuous and discontinuous, the finished and unfinished. The unfinished species is theater, which, although narrating an action metaphorically placed in the past, reproduces it in the present, through the performance of the actors on stage.67 The finished modality is what we call epic, or narrative proper (myth, legend, novel, etc.), which does not reproduce the action in the present, but simply evokes or narrates it as past.68

The theatrical genre also divides according to the finished and unfinished. The finished subspecies refers to the factum, the time that unfolds in the sense of the irreversible sequence of causes and consequences: it is tragedy, which celebrates the victory of necessity, of fate over man. When, on the contrary, the chain of the factum can be broken by Providence, giving man initial possibilities that would be lost in the enforcement of irreversibility, we then have the comedic subspecies.69

Similarly, the finished or epic narrative genres are divided according to the time modality that shapes them:

  1. The mythical subspecies express events that occurred “in that time” (in illo tempore), that is, in the mythical time of perpetuity and the mundus imaginalis. This is really the verbal tense of biblical and Quranic narratives, as well as of Greek myths.

  2. At the other extreme, we have the novelistic genre (novel, novella, and short story), which is definitively demarcated by earthly temporality (regardless of how varied the technical treatment the narrator gives to time may be).

  3. Between both, we can admit an intermediate species, which are the gestas and legends, which, essentially dealing with the divinization of a human hero, establish a bridge between temporality and eviternity. Novels and romances of “initiatory” content can, obviously, present classification difficulties, occupying an uncertain place between the novelistic and the legendary. The best, in almost all cases, is to frame them as legends disguised as novels.

The enormous development of novelistic genres in the Modern Age, parallel to the retraction of the legendary genre, thus manifests the progressive loss of the sense of eviternity in our civilization. This loss occurs concomitantly with the diffusion of modern European languages, devoid of the aorist, and also with the loss of the symbolic sense of the universe, in favor of a more earthly, temporalized, and empirical experience, during the transition from the medieval worldview to the Renaissance.

8. Species of Expository Genre

Just as narratives are divided according to the continuity or discontinuity of time, expository genres also differentiate according to the continuity or discontinuity of the spatial and simultaneous whole representing the logical and ontological order. If the continuity and discontinuity of time were expressed in the concepts of “finished” and “unfinished” and in the corresponding verbal tenses, the equivalent concepts for spatial order are the notions of whole and part, and of inclusion and exclusion.

We will only sketch out the expository genre here, but we believe that this minimal criteria can be indefinitely applied in successive divisions of species and subspecies, equally accounting for all possible combinations.

Expository works are initially divided into those that deal with the “whole” and those that deal with the “part”; and each of these is further divided according to whether it addresses its subject in an “inclusive” or “exclusive” way.

The ideas of “whole” and “inclusion” form the mold of all literary species that have the nature of a roll, a cast, an inventory, an accumulation, and an enumeration, whose model par excellence is the encyclopedia. They are works that, ultimately, aim to contain “everything”, or as much as possible: de omne re scibili. All subspecies of didactic and informative works participate in this species, ranging from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including Isidore’s Etymologies.

Opposing the indiscriminate breadth of the roll, the idea of system, or organization, also aims at a “whole”, but a whole separated and hierarchized in its parts, aspects, dimensions, therefore subjected to a sequence of “exclusions”. This is the treatise, or systematic genre. A treatise, for example, is Aristotle’s Organon, as well as Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, or Euclid’s Elements; each of these works aims to encompass the totality of a subject, however, systematizing it according to its aspects and intrinsic constitutive parts, and not only according to a casual, extrinsic and opportunistic order as in encyclopedias.

At the other extreme, we have works governed by the idea of part, or aspect. These are works that focus on a given phenomenon, or group of phenomena, idea or group of ideas in particular, without the purpose of constituting a total system of knowledge. But this approach to the part can also be done according to two modalities: inclusion or exclusion.

On one hand, there are works that, dealing with a particular subject, aim to insert it into a pre-existing body of knowledge, already systematized. For example, when Apollonius of Perga writes his treatise on Cones, he does not intend either to set up a complete system of geometry, or simply to release some ideas into the air: he intends to fit these ideas into a precise place in the pre-existing body of geometric science; and this purpose guides and shapes the treatment he gives to his subject, which must be a systematic treatment within the concepts and rules admitted in geometry. We call this genre of works a thesis, which comes from a verb that means “to place”. The man who does a thesis as if placing a piece in a pre-existing framework; and the shape of the piece has to fit into the determined hollow where it intends to fit.

On the other hand, if the idea to be presented has no formal and decisive commitment to a pre-existing system of knowledge, then what the author does is freely add one more idea to the broad and vague repertoire of human ideas. This is precisely what the essay genre does.

The differentiation of expository species can thus continue indefinitely, by the simple application of the criteria of whole and part, inclusion and exclusion. There are also a myriad of possible mixtures. It is not necessary to carry the enumeration further, but we believe we have already demonstrated the efficiency of the criteria. Just to give an idea of the possibilities of continuation: the essay species can be subdivided according to whether the essay is more committed or less committed to a pre-existing scientific criterion: “Science as a Vocation”, “Politics as a Vocation” and other works gathered in Weber’s Essays in Sociology thus differ from Montaigne’s Essays, because the former are closer to “exclusion”, and the latter, to “inclusion”. And so on. It is not necessary, at the moment, to take this criteria to more detailed applications.

9. The Lyric Genre. Conclusion

What is, indeed, necessary, is to say a word about the lyric genre, which seems to have mysteriously fallen out of our scheme. What happens with lyricism is that it, strictly speaking, does not structure itself according to simultaneity or succession, neither by space nor by time. On the contrary, it is characterized by its supra-spatial and supra-temporal nature. Whether expressed in prose or verse, lyricism precisely expresses the only terrestrial equivalent of the dimension that surpasses both eviternity and temporality; it structures itself according to the aspiration of eternity, and its formal module is the concept of “moment”, whose spatial equivalent is the “point”, an expression of what arithmetically is unity.70 Lyricism highlights a moment in time, a point in space, and projects it into non-time and non-space. That it has to resort to verbal tools derived from space and time, continuity and discontinuity, succession and simultaneity, precisely marks the limits of what can be humanly expressed and the mutual annulment of space and time when they intersect at the “point” or “moment”. Therefore, lyricism is the purest expression of relation, or order, or number, that is, of the dimension that articulates, encompasses, and contains space and time.

Strictly speaking, literary genres are archetypal realities: they frame and guide the multiplicity of facts of literary history, without ever manifesting themselves in all their integral purity – for temporality imitates perenniality, without being able to identify with it – and also without ever completely disappearing from the scene, no matter how unrecognizable the crowd, often confused, of facts and particular variations make them. The difficulty contemporary man feels in understanding genres and recognizing them amid the confusion of empirical data is exactly the same as he finds to recognize any archetypal sense in the facts of an entirely banalized and reified everyday life, whose ties with the world of archetypes have been obscured by the smoke and noise of commercial and industrial immediatism, as well as by the polluting distortions that the mass communications industry criminally introduces into the world of images and symbols. The difficulty of seeing is in the subject, not in the object.

Table of Genres

CONDITION

GENRE

SPECIES AND SUBSPECIES

TIME

NARRATIVE

Discontinuous
FACTUAL NARRATIVE

Continuous
TESTIMONY

Subjective:
MEMORY

Objective:
CHRONICLE

Discontinuous
HISTORY

Continuous
SYMBOLIC NARRATIVE

Continuous
DRAMA

Discontinuous
TRAGEDY

Continuous
COMEDY

Discontinuous
EPIC

Continuous
MYTH

Transition:
LEGEND

Discontinuous
NOVEL, SHORT STORY, NOVELLA

NUMBER

LYRIC

SPACE

EXPOSITION

Continuous

Inclusion:
DIDACTIC

(WHOLE)

Exclusion:
TREATISE

Discontinuous

Inclusion:
ESSAY

(PART)

Exclusion:
THESIS

ETC.

Part 2 – Films: Critical Studies

I. Symbols and Myths in the Film “The Silence of the Lambs”

Preface by José Carlos Monteiro

Like a sphinx, The Silence of the Lambs imposed itself, devouring, on the crowd of critics who endeavored to decipher its enigmas. Many, hurried and superficial, avoided the challenge. They preferred to dismiss the film as if it were just a tense and effective thriller – a judicious and solid adaptation of Thomas Harris' homonymous novel, without the transcendence that some exegetes insisted on seeing behind its “Hollywood” appearance. Thus, with this evasive attitude, they spared themselves the embarrassment of not having found adequate answers to the numerous mysteries latent in Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece. But other critics, irresistibly fascinated by the film’s lush symbolism, set out to investigate it more deeply, trying to go beyond the formal appearances and its immediate impact.

The revelation of the immanent and transcendent qualities of the film, in all its latitudes, however, did not belong to film critics, but to scholars of myths and symbols. One of them, Olavo de Carvalho, was particularly successful in elucidating the metaphors, archetypal realities, and esoteric suggestions of The Silence of the Lambs. In the lectures delivered at the Astroscientia School on the occasion of the presentation of the film among us, his insight shed new light on both the narrative and its meaning and regarding the representation and images set up by the American director. From this analysis, fascinating and – I dare to affirm – definitive, emerges the vision of a dense and profound work, occultist and initiatic, unparalleled in American cinema in recent times. In Europe, the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker), the French Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, Lancelot du Lac, Le Procès de Jeanne D’Arc), the Italian Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), the Greek Theo Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist, The Travelling Players) and – why not? – the Polish Andrzej Zutawski (Third Part of the Night) have long been probing in their films the inner torments, the painful processes of “knowledge of pain”, the vicissitudes of those who go from downfall to redemption.

Olavo de Carvalho combines, on the one hand, an interest in symbolic arts, in the world of the invisible, and, on the other hand, demonstrates a special understanding of the resources that the creator uses to make his work a film that is both classic and modern. With extreme clarity, without bookish erudition, but with a remarkable command of the sources on which it is based, Olavo de Carvalho takes his interpretation of the symbolism of The Silence of the Lambs to sophisticated levels. In his view, Jonathan Demme’s work was conceived and gestated in such a way as to portray the initiatory journey of the characters (in particular the central protagonists of the plot, the cunning and cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the perplexed detective Clarice Starling, the mysterious FBI chief Jack Crawford and the delusional serial killer Jame Gumb). Moreover, Demme, in Olavo de Carvalho’s analysis, wanted above all to make his film “an apologue about the struggle between human intelligence and diabolical cunning” – an apologue about the path of initiation and self-knowledge.

Diderot, the writer and encyclopedist, thought that “all true poetry is emblematic”. If so, it can be said that The Silence of the Lambs contains, poetically, in each image all the emblems of the quest for individuation, revelation, truth. Through the journey of Clarice Starling, Jonathan Demme evokes the itinerary of medieval knights in search of the Holy Grail, of all mystics in confrontation with the temptations of the World and the Devil. In his text, as if he were in an aesthetic and spiritual cosmoprocess, Olavo de Carvalho re-dimensions the anxieties and perplexities of the figure of Clarice Starling to better make us understand her gestures, her attitudes. And, as if he were with a magnifying lens, (re)configures each plane, each sequence of The Silence of the Lambs to, at the end of the day, give us back a new film. I believe that even for its author.

Foreword to the First Edition

This book transcribes – without alterations except in details of style – the handout distributed to the listeners of the three lectures that, under the title "Symbolic interpretation of the film The Silence of the Lambs", I pronounced at the Astroscientia School in Rio de Janeiro, in July 1991, when the film was still in theaters.

Some copies were also distributed to people in the cinema and the press; but fortuitous, adverse circumstances prevented a regular edition from being made then, which is now undertaken thanks to the generous collaboration of Stella Caymmi and Ana Maria Santos Peixoto.

The awarding of the film with five Oscars, now in April 1992, is a good occasion to put it back into debate, trying, for the second time, to go a little beyond the routine and banal comments (when not frankly wrong) that were the only reaction of the national criticism when it was shown here.

This book belongs to an anachronistic genre, and will certainly arouse some strangeness on the part of a public accustomed to receiving, under the label of “film criticism”, something entirely different. It’s that, when I was eighteen – two and a half decades ago, and in another Brazil – it was not a sin to write long essays about a film; it was not a sin to think, investigate, try to deepen the meaning of a film. Essays like this were published all the time in the press, and we, young aficionados, as soon as the session ended ran in search of the wise words of Luís Francisco de Almeida Salles, Paulo Emílio, Guido Logger, Alex Vianny; of all those who dedicated themselves to the craft of helping us understand the art of cinema; a craft that today suffers the stigma of disapproval, except when exercised discreetly and within the university ghetto. The pages of criticism in newspapers are for something else, and thinking in public has become indecent. I regret offending decorum: it’s that, decidedly, I belong to another era.

Olavo de Carvalho

1. Terror and Pity

The Silence of the Lambs is much more than the skillfully executed thriller or the passionate drama that the Brazilian critics saw in it. If it touches the audience’s heart so intensely, it is less for the macabre fascination of the theme, for the almost hallucinating skill of the direction, or for the memorable performances of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster than for the profound symbolism of its fable. Even when it goes unnoticed by the viewer’s consciousness, this symbolism cannot fail to reach them in the core of their human condition, by the force of a universal language. Its symbolic scope elevates Jonathan Demme’s film to the category of a great work of art.

Like all great art, this film triggers consequences that extend far beyond immediate aesthetic enjoyment and reverberate in long-lasting psychological benefits. Never since M, the Vampire of Düsseldorf, by Fritz Lang, or Shame, by Ingmar Bergman, has cinema been so close to achieving an intention comparable to that of Greek tragedy, which, in the words of Aristotle, was to inspire “terror and pity”, or more precisely, pity through terror: to purify the human soul and incline it towards good by the vision of the absurd and evil inherent in the cosmic order.

However, to fully enjoy the gains that this work brings us, it is necessary to go beyond the pure aesthetic impact of the first hour, and deepen an intellectual awareness of its meaning. The educator who shows and warns, directing the viewer’s attention to the significant points and deep structures, thus prolongs and enhances the artist’s work, opening the channels for their encounter with the audience’s soul.

This would, strictly speaking, be the critic’s task. I cannot conceive of the militant critic as anything other than a kind of educator, in the line proposed by Mathew Arnold. It is therefore not surprising that I am so often disappointed with the national criticism, whether of films, books, or plays: it has been reduced to mere news, appreciation according to technical-industrial standards, or the expression of the critic’s personal feelings. These three modes of anti-education were exhaustively practiced in relation to The Silence of the Lambs. Thus, a great pedagogical opportunity was missed. In the following pages, I do what I can to remedy the loss.

2. A False Lead

I start with an example. Márcia Cezimbra, in her article in the Ideas section of Jornal do Brasil,71 puts readers on a false trail, through which they will never understand the film. But the error must have gone unnoticed, since many viewers, whom I consulted, revealed they understood the story exactly like Cezimbra: a fable of desire, the drama of passion between a cannibal psychopath and a beautiful FBI agent. This interpretation was also endorsed by almost all critics.

I would not dare to oppose all this respectable unanimity if it were not also contradicted by the statements of the film’s two main actors, made in interviews that were either not read or not taken seriously in Brazil. Hopkins says that Dr. Lecter – the supposed object of heroine Clarice Starling’s desires – is indeed the Devil. Not a devil, but the Devil, proper noun. And Jodie Foster states that Clarice is a true heroine, as there has never been one in the history of cinema, because, in the context of a mythological drama, she has to “fight against the demons and know herself.” That’s exactly how I understood the film: the struggle of a Socratic heroine to unearth the truth from the depths of darkness, lies, and madness. Jodie is right to say that such a heroine has never been in the history of cinema (with the possible exception, I note, of Robert Bresson’s Joan of Arc). But little girls fascinated by sexy monsters are a commonplace we can see every week in canned TV shows, molded on King Kong or Beauty and the Beast. If Jodie and Hopkins are right, then the Brazilian critics have profoundly misunderstood.

The reason they missed the target lies in certain mental mannerisms that have spread like an epidemic among Brazilian intellectuals and that make them see everything through a prefabricated bias. In Brazil, the words “desire” and “passion” have become universal keys in recent years, applicable left and right for the explanation of everything. There is also a wave of militant Nietzscheanism locally, which can only see something good when in the form of an apparent evil and which looks for a symptom of hypocrisy or false consciousness in every explicit affirmation of positive values.

For this mindset, everything in the world is disguise and self-deception: once the veils of pretense are removed, the only real reality comes to the surface, which, in all cases and circumstances, always and only consists of passion and desire, with touches of Machiavellianism endorsed as natural and healthy under the guise of “sincerity” – as if every direct manifestation of generous feelings were a gross unconscious treachery and there could be sincerity only in assumed pretense or explicit evil. The resulting hermeneutics – which its followers apply indiscriminately to the interpretation of psychopathological symptoms, works of art, philosophical systems, everything, in short, except their own ideas – is rigid, mechanical, and repetitive to the point of dementia.

It goes without saying that the inclination to see things through this malicious lens is a Brazilian sociological phenomenon, easily explained by our intellectuals' disillusionment with the hard-won democracy that was so quickly spoiled. Viewed through this hermeneutics, the Sun is driven by shadows and, obviously, the active pole of The Silence of the Lambs's plot can only be Dr. Lecter. Logical: he is the worst, so he must be the best. The intelligent devil exerts a fascination on the defeated intelligentsia, who, seeing the victory of evil in the world, dreams of becoming like them, but, unable to compete with the scoundrels in the field of practical evil, satisfies itself in corrupting ideas and signs, and, hypnotized by Dr. Lecter’s evil smile, attributes its own state of soul to Clarice Starling, without noticing that, with this, it is not making an interpretation but a projection.

Stories of unmasking values, where good can only appear in the inverted form of explicit evil sincerity, continue to be in fashion in Brazil, for example in TV soap operas. They are typical of situations of social disillusionment, where a marginalized intellectual class gnaws at resentments: with what relief the complexed young genius does not receive the news that Nietzsche valued resentment as a hermeneutical method, that Freud saw in malicious suspicion the innermost attitude conducive to the psychological investigator! To poison the environment, exuding resentment and malice from all pores, then becomes a superior modality of scientific knowledge, the ultimate objective of all intellectual activity. This is the dominant state of mind in Brazilian intellectualism, at least in its noisiest part – and apparently nobody there realizes that there is a contradiction between stimulating malice and preaching public morality.

But, in American cinema, what we see today is the opposite: it’s a trend towards the explicit and literal affirmation of positive values, as noted by the success of Dances with Wolves, a direct and “naive” apology for good and honesty. Wouldn’t it be more logical to interpret The Silence of the Lambs in the light of this dominant trend in its country of origin than to forcibly squeeze it into the frame of local and momentary concerns of Brazilian intellectualism?

In other words: my hypothesis is that director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally wanted to make an apologue about the struggle between human intelligence and devilish cunning, and they couldn’t care less about passion, desire, Freud, Nietzsche and the whole nine yards. The wave of Freud and Nietzsche in the US has already ended, and there was never a Nelson Rodrigues there. Around here is where they are forcing the bar to see things from the edge of the abyss, and when this perspective is projected on some idea or work that comes from abroad the result is that what does not exist is seen and the public is persuaded to believe that it exists. This is how, by a cruel irony, even cultural debate ends up isolating this country from the world, closing the windows that it is supposed to open.

Of course there are passion and desire in the story of The Silence of the Lambs, but they are there as elements of the subject – among other elements and subjects – and not as determinants of form, structure and meaning, which, in this as in any other narrative, cinematic or literary, are the decisive thing.

Also, it’s clear that Dr. Lecter is fascinating, especially for his enigmatic and ambiguous nature. But from there to say that this fascination managed to trap Clarice in the meshes of an abyssal passion, the distance is great: it’s the one that exists between owning a gun and committing a murder. Dr. Lecter is fascinating, yes, but Clarice is quite clever. Already in the opening of the duel of wills between the two, the first to lower his eyes is Lecter, not Clarice (I watched the movie again just to clear this up); she continues to take advantage when she challenges the cannibal to know himself and he jumps out, irritated; and in the end she doesn’t leave the first meeting without getting at least a part of what she wanted. Only in the first round she already wins Lecter by three to zero. She never gives in anything. The only advantage she offers to Lecter is only apparent: it is a trick conceived by Jack Crawford, Clarice’s boss, to induce Lecter to collaborate in the capture of the murderer Jame Gumb; and the return of the drawings, in the end, is a mere pretext to obtain from Lecter one more piece of information. From meeting to meeting, she becomes increasingly confident – and, at the moment when the whole audience is sweating with fear that Lecter might make the heroine his dessert, she calmly assures her friend Ardelia Mapp: “I know he’s not going to look for me”. In the end, we find out that Lecter, although disguising and grumbling, had already given Clarice all the service. Tough girl!

3. The Brain Behind It All

The character Lecter is quite flashy, but this should not lead us to the mistake of hypertrophying the power he has in the story. After all, everything that happens (except for some accidents along the way that do not interfere with the final result) was planned beforehand by Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford. He knew that Lecter was isolated in the basement and eager for contact with the world; that Lecter hadn’t seen a woman in eight years; that Lecter had information about “Buffalo Bill”; and that Clarice, with manners, could get from the prisoner whatever she wanted. Crawford is the only one who, from the start, sees the whole picture of possibilities and, with the ingenuity of a demiurge, sets the wheels of destiny in motion. Lecter has known him for a long time, and has reason to fear him, while for his other opponents he feels nothing but contempt. He knows that everything is a plan by Crawford and, even before someone asks him (for Clarice herself was still unaware of the project), agrees to play his part. He seeks only to gain a collateral advantage from this, which does not consist in eating Clarice (in any sense of the term), much less in offering resistance to Crawford, but rather, much more modestly, in arranging an opportunity to escape.

Crawford, like the patriarch Abraham of the Quranic narrative or the Saint Bernard of the medieval legend, made the devil work for him, the evil serving the good. He has something of the wizard Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who manipulates the dark elements and, overcoming improbability, manages to lead everything to a happy ending with the victory of good and light. Lecter, for his part, could define himself as Goethe’s Mephistopheles:

I am part of the Energy

that always intends Evil

and that always creates Good.72

A French saying states that the devil carries stones; and after all, someone has to do the dirty part of the service. Considering that Lecter does not create difficulties for Crawford, that he abstains from attacking Clarice and that all those he kills in the course of the plot are his persecutors, and not innocent victims like those of “Buffalo Bill”, the price of his collaboration was quite modest. Lecter read in the minds of others, but Crawford read in Lecter’s, where he himself saw nothing. Our critics did not realize that, behind the Clarice-Lecter and Clarice-Bill struggle, the distant duel between the two psychologists is the true structuring motif of the plot, and that it echoes, moreover, an ancient motif of initiatory narratives: the “duel of the magicians”.

4. The Fascinated Fascinator

If Clarice does not allow herself to be fascinated by Lecter, he indeed falls fascinated by her (exactly as Crawford had planned); and, under the tough appearance of a brain-picker seeking to unmask and dominate her, deep down it is he who idealizes and worships her, while she remains firm and strong on the ground of relentless realism. On his table, in the cage set up to imprison him in the Shelby County Courthouse, one of his drawings shows Clarice, surrounded by a luminous halo, with a lamb in her lap. It’s an icon. Having sought to probe the depths of Clarice’s mind, Lecter knows perfectly well what he found there. How could an experienced demon fail to recognize the Virgin Mary? Stripped by Lecter’s watchful eye of the external identity of a professional woman, what appears deep within Clarice is not a bundle of banal Freudian desires and dreams of social ascent of a country girl, but rather the Virgin’s helpless weeping before the sacrifice of the Lamb. One must be blinded by anti-Christian fanaticism not to notice in the film such a patent evangelical reference.

5. Brave Clarice

The “brave Clarice”, as he calls her, while being able to recognize with such sincerity the human weaknesses that Lecter unveils in her, ignores however the secret superior identity that he discovered behind them. Therefore, he can continue playing to despise and deceive her in front, while secretly devoting worship and service to her. The Devil is also a servant of God, albeit in his ambiguous and recalcitrant way; zealous of his reputation as a rebel, the old trickster tries to save face. The ambiguity of serving good with the worst of intentions is, incidentally, one of his defining traits, and it makes him, traditionally, more of a farce character than a tragic one. Universal literature has explored this abundantly, from Marlowe to Goethe to our popular literature (Peleja de Manuel Riachão contra o Diabo) and the popular theater of Ariano Suassuna (Auto da compadecida, A pena e a lei). It is from this same ambiguity that the subtle charm we see in the monstrous Lecter emanates; as Anthony Hopkins aptly observed in his interview, “the devil has a sense of humor”: when the terrible exceeds a certain measure, it becomes funny. It is a convoluted pedantry to seek psychoanalytic reasons to explain the attractiveness of the Devil, when it is only a topos (a commonplace or repeatable scheme) of universal literature, and it always works when used with art.

6. Essence and Accident

Clarice, on her part, is not deluded about Lecter. When an elevator operator asks her if he is a vampire, she replies that “there is no name for what he is”. What has no name has no essence, which is a way of saying that it is nothing. It is not a coincidence that this speech immediately precedes the scene where Lecter recommends Clarice to “stick to the essential, despising the accidental”. According to an ancient theodicy, evil is not properly a being, but something like the accidental effect of the inopportune confluence of goods of different kinds (for example, it is good to love a woman and it is good to have a friend; but it can happen that we love our friend’s wife). Evil is a “relationship”, not a “substance”; a “shadow”, not a “body”. Studying a contemporary satanist sect, an informed author compares evil to a sum of absences, which gives rise to a suction force that, unable to exist in itself, clings to and relies on the dark or poorly known side of things.73 Socrates and Vedantism went further, decreeing that the only evil is ignorance. The fascination, the subservience before evil, springs precisely from those zones of the soul that are most unknown to us – from the “unconscious”, if you will, deposit, according to Dr. Freud, of the desires and images rejected by the conscious mind. Seeking to evade the malicious gaze that pierces conscious defenses, the frightened victim prostrates herself before the adversary, hoping for his mercy. This is precisely the side that Clarice does not offer to Lecter: when he tries to psychologically unmask her, she does not flee, does not shelter behind vain defenses, nor tries to touch the adversary to soften the harshness of his penetrating gaze; with simple frankness, she acknowledges the truth of the infantile feelings that Lecter discerns within her; the transparency of her motives and the firm acceptance of truth ultimately transmute Lecter’s suspicious gaze, subjugating and putting at her service all the malice of the wicked doctor. Intending to disarm her, Lecter finds within her the invincible fortress of upright intention. And the devil, who despises those who worship him, surrenders with admiration before the heroine who loves truth.

In his Logic lesson on essence and accident, Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius. The Roman emperor was one of the great philosophers of Stoicism, a school that preached abstine et sustine: detachment and firmness. This is not the only stoic reference in the film. Right at the beginning, Clarice is seen training in a forest behind the FBI headquarters in Quantico. At the entrance to the forest, three wooden posters nailed to the trees exhort the police apprentice to endure pain, agony, and suffering. A fourth poster adds the Christian commandment to the stoic message: Love. Two drops of stoicism in a single film are enough to arouse curiosity. If Dr. Hannibal Lecter is not a Brazilian intellectual, who quotes without reading, it will be worth our while to take a peek at this Marcus Aurelius.

7. Stoicism and Christianity

The blend of Stoic and Christian commandments is not strange. Early Christian philosophers recognized the value of Stoic ethics and sought to absorb it into Christianity. Marcus Aurelius said, for example, that the aspiring sage should not flee from evil, but get used to facing it to neutralize it, becoming immune to its allure. From the height of his apátheia (“absence of emotions”), the accomplished sage could then extinguish evil with the force of his objective and serene gaze, which calls things by their true names, without adding or subtracting anything (it is the “intellectual simplicity” mentioned by Lecter). But, deep within apátheia, the sage should always maintain an attitude of “understanding mercy.” It is a kind of intellectual kindness or compassion, not emotional. It consists of being open to understanding everything, even what is vile and repugnant, but without being emotionally influenced.

Apátheia and “understanding mercy” are precisely the most suitable terms to describe the attitude of Clarice towards Hannibal Lecter; she does not hate him, she does not fear him, she does not love him, she does not despise him; she observes and listens to him, without closing herself off to anything or letting herself be subjugated by anything he says or does. She firmly maintains (sustine et abstine) her position in front of Lecter, without straying a single millimeter from understanding mercy on one hand, and fidelity to duty on the other. What balances the two scales of the Stoic balance, in essence, is compassion for Buffalo Bill’s victims: the lambs she wishes to save. Clarice therefore embodies the synthesis of Stoicism and Christianity, announced by the posters in the forest.

8. Masculine and Feminine

Some Christian thinkers reproached Stoicism for the merely passive and reactive character of its ethics: it would overly emphasize patience, resistance, abstinence, and less so active sacrifice and the struggle for good. Stoic virtues would be, in summary, exclusively “feminine,” without the virile mark of Christ the King. A true Christian Stoicism, to exist, would have to inject some histamine into the old and tired Marcus Aurelius.

But Christianity does not despise, as such, the “feminine” virtues. Their epitome, in the Christian vision, is precisely the Holy Virgin. She does nothing, properly speaking, throughout the Gospel narrative. She only obeys, suffers, waits, and weeps before the inevitable. Clarice also passively suffers from the impossibility of saving the lambs – even if it’s just one. She also suffers, stunned like the lambs, at the death of her father. It is from this defenseless pain, however, that the vocation of the fighting Clarice is born, who faces Lecter in a psychological duel and shoots down Buffalo Bill, just as from the “passive” Virgin the Christ, prototype of active sacrifice, is born; and just as from the “useless” weeping of the mother at the foot of the cross arises the innumerable multitude of believers. The ancient liturgy repeats the cycle, in which the suffering Church gives birth to the fighting Church, and from this, the triumphant Church.

9. Masters and Disciples

The same dialectic of passive and active is repeated in Clarice’s complementary character, Jack Crawford. Intellectually, he is the most active, in fact, the only active one, because he is the one who plans and directs everything, to such an extent that one could say that the entire plot of the events is nothing more than an external projection of something that took place in Jack Crawford’s mind. But in practice, he does not participate directly in the action. His only attempt at personal intervention (when he invades Buffalo Bill’s house in Calumet City) is a mistake he regrets: he should have left everything in Clarice’s hands, as seemed to be his initial intent. But gurus also fail, at least in the initiatory narrative, because they only represent the Spirit, and they are not truly it, which gives a measure of the differences between this narrative genre and the sacred and mythological epics that constitute its model.

Here I need to explain myself more carefully. Sacred and mythological epics are those narrative poems that, for an entire civilization, have the prestige of revealed truths; at the beginning of time, they establish the worldview, values, laws, and educational principles that will guide men and shape customs as long as that civilization lasts. Initiatory narratives are stories invented at a later time, and which, without having the authority of primordial revelations, are admitted by certain groups or individuals as a kind of spiritual or religious teaching. The initiatory narratives usually deal with aspects or parts of the sacred epics, which they prolong, illustrate, comment on, and specify, adapting the core of the spiritual message to the mentality and language of a new era. They reinvigorate and update certain spiritual potentialities contained in the revelation, which would risk weakening as the passage of time and changes in language make it increasingly difficult for new generations to directly understand the sacred epic. Initiatory narratives are Dante’s Divine Comedy, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Goethe’s Faust, Greek tragedy in its entirety, Camões’s The Lusiads, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; and, in our time, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Sacred epics are the poems of Homer, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Quran, the Old Testament, the Gospels, etc.

The difference between the sacred epic and the initiatory narrative fundamentally consists in the fact that the heroes of the first are gods, demigods or, in a strict monotheistic framework, aspects of God or forces of divine origin. The heroes of the initiatory narrative, without having divine powers or speaking directly in God’s name, are human beings of exceptional stature, protected or closely guided by divine forces, whose presence and action in the world they represent in a more or less subtle and indirect manner.

Both in the sacred epic and in the initiatory narrative, the characters of masters or gurus always represent the divine Spirit, who knows everything beforehand and guides from above the journey of a disciple, who personifies the human Soul in the process of spiritualizing or divinizing. A striking difference between the two genres is that, in the sacred epic, the master is the divine Spirit, in a literal and integral way (in the Odyssey, Mentes is Minerva, goddess of wisdom; in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is an aspect of Brahma, etc.); whereas in the initiatory narrative, the character of the master is just a human being more or less closely linked to divine knowledge; he is a priest, a mage, a sage, and not a divine being; therefore, while he “divinely” guides the disciple, he is not exempt from human failings. For example, Merlin, in the Holy Grail, temporarily loses to Morgana Le Fay, and Sarastro is temporarily defeated by the Queen of the Night, etc.

The initiatory narrative, although it has structural laws that define it, can be grafted onto an infinite variety of different narrative genres, in novelistic literature, in theater, in epic poetry or in cinema. Its deep structure is compatible with the most diverse coatings, from the fantastic to the “realistic”. The only indispensable elements are the master, the disciple, the adversary, and the adventures that purify the disciple’s soul or reveal knowledge to him. The adversary can be a person (like, in the Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night) or an adverse and diabolical situation that challenges the hero’s intelligence or tempts his soul (as in the Maurizius Process, by Jakob Wasserman). The master can also be a flesh-and-blood character (like Sarastro), a mythological allusion (Venus in The Lusiads), or a simple superior aspect of the disciple’s own soul (the magical premonition that guides Etzel Andergast in Wasserman’s novel). The point of interest, the differential criterion that certifies us to be in the presence of a narrative of this genre, is not the material content of the events, but the relationship between the forces, in short: the structure of the plot.

Many works of literature, cinema, and theater appeal to the use of “esoteric” symbols and myths, without this making them initiatory narratives. On the contrary, the particular symbols contained in a narrative only acquire perfect aesthetic functionality when the deep structure of the work is that of an initiatory narrative; without this, symbols and myths become mere pedantic adornments. The total structure and the particular symbolisms must be coerced and tied to each other in an organic arrangement, reflecting one of the main laws of symbolic language, which is that of correspondence between the part and the whole, the small and the great, the micro and the macrocosm. Only very skilled artists achieve this fit, which is why a good part of the “esoteric” art in circulation is pure garbage.

Both in structure, in the symbols to which it alludes, or in strict obedience to the principle of correspondence, The Silence of the Lambs reveals itself as an initiatory narrative, and one of the most perfect that cinema has ever given us. In it, there is not a single symbolic or mythological reference that does not fit with extreme adequacy and happiness in the total structure of the work, reflecting this whole on the scale of detail; and the global structure, in turn, has all the required elements: the master, the disciple, the diabolical adversary, the revealing and purifying adventures.

In this way, it is quite natural that we find, between Clarice and Crawford, the Soul-Spirit relationship, that Crawford is inactive in appearance and active at the core, that Clarice remains faithful to Crawford’s intent even when she seemingly disobeys him, and that Crawford, finally, makes a mistake at the time when this mistake has already been, miraculously, corrected by Providence. The Soul, in the initiatory narrative, is passive in front of the Spirit, but active in front of the world; she fights, but her fight is to remain faithful to the Spirit in a world where adversities, temptations, and deceptions threaten to drag her away from her calling.

That Jack Crawford, in the film, is the master or guru of Clarice, there is no doubt. One of her colleagues literally mentions him as such (“Your guru, on the phone”). Is Lecter, in turn, the guru of Buffalo Bill, the devilish mockery of the Spirit, which also frequently appears in initiatory narratives? We will see later. For now, what matters is to note that Crawford, in his functions as guru, maintains a discreet second-plan performance, away from the center of physical action (except for a slip), and that, in the end, he modestly withdraws, leaving the disciple the honors of the party. Just like Mozart’s Sarastro, who, at the end of the Magic Flute, after articulating and directing from afar Tamino’s struggle to free Pamina, disappears in a halo of light, leaving the joy of victory to the disciples. It is also a topos, a repeatable scheme. But how it works!

10. A Pair of Pairs

Regarding Jame Gumb (this is Buffalo Bill’s name), he is to Lecter as Clarice is to Crawford. He is their complementary opposite. The parallelism is strict and it’s worth delving into. First, let’s look at the Lecter-Gumb pair:

  1. Lecter only kills his tormentors; Gumb kills innocent victims.
  2. Lecter is cold and rational; Gumb is passionate, overwhelmed, and out of control (he decides to hasten Catherine’s death in a fit of rage).
  3. Lecter despises his victims; Gumb, on the other hand, admires and covets his.
  4. Lecter eats his victims, he internalizes them; Gumb wishes to get inside them by wearing their skin.
  5. Lecter is “superior” to his victims; he is the accusing devil, who judges and punishes (thus carrying out a type of “justice”). Gumb is “inferior”, he attacks precisely those who possess what he lacks.
  6. Lecter extinguishes his victims to continue existing; he affirms his identity at the expense of others' extinction. Gumb, on the other hand, denies his own identity and wishes to transform, to die as an ugly man to be reborn as a beautiful girl.

From the comparison, the traditional figure of the double aspect of evil leaps to the eye, which the Bible personifies in Lucifer and Satan, the “superior” demon that perverts intelligence, and the “inferior” demon that incites to abyssal passions and body destruction. The demon as an adversary of the Spirit and as an enemy of the Soul. In this sense, Lecter is the adversary of Crawford, as Gumb is to Clarice. Master against master, disciple against disciple.

The parallelism of Lecter with Crawford is different: they are not two different planes of a force of the same tendency, but two equals of opposing forces. In other words: Lecter and Gumb are equal in sense (evil), but different in force. Lecter and Crawford are equivalent forces, but different in sense:

  1. Like Crawford, Lecter does not participate in most of the external action. His contribution is merely intellectual. He remains “still” at the bottom of his basement, while on the surface Clarice’s investigations and Gumb’s crimes unfold.
  2. Like Crawford, he has a certain overall view of what is going on (which Clarice and Gumb do not have). The difference is that Crawford plans the entirety of the action, and Lecter only a part.
  3. If Crawford is Clarice’s guru, Lecter also seeks to be. He does not conform to the passive role of mere information provider: he wants to be Clarice’s analyst and master. She, knowing that this role flatters him, takes advantage of his vanity (“I came to learn from you”). Crawford, on the other hand, as a former teacher, naturally has the role of a master, which he exercises modestly. Lecter seeks to show his dominance over Clarice (when in fact it is he who is being remotely directed by Crawford’s plan), while Crawford directs Clarice from a distance, without demonstrating that he does so.
  4. Both make a mistake, by underestimating Clarice. Lecter, at first, by taking the girl only as a presumptuous country girl; later the contempt turns into admiration, and the admiration into service. Crawford, in the end, by unduly assuming part of the task he had assigned to Clarice.
  5. Crawford knows all of Clarice’s past (her childhood, her father’s death, her student life). Lecter knows all of Gumb’s past, and even keeps a living record of the start of Gumb’s career as a killer in Miss Mofet’s warehouse.
  6. Both have known each other for a long time, and fear each other: Crawford knows that Lecter is capable of anything; Lecter is aware that Crawford is “an old fox”.
  7. Finally, both have a partial failure: Lecter wants to dominate Clarice, and he fails; Crawford wants to personally capture Gumb, and he also fails.

The parallelism, with inverse positions, sets the stage for the “duel of the magicians”.

11. A Disturbing Partnership

The relationship between Lecter and Gumb is the most disturbing and enigmatic aspect of the story. The movie suggests that they have known each other for a long time; and, considering the difference in intelligence and psychological strength between the two, it’s inconceivable that Lecter wouldn’t dominate Gumb. In this case, he would be his guru, who initiated him on the path of crime. The episode with Benjamin Raspail leaves a certain ambiguity in the air: it seems that it was Gumb who killed him, but it is evident that Lecter desired or rejoiced at this death; and, if he did not consider it somehow his work, why would he keep his trophies in Miss Mofet’s sinister museum?

On the other hand, if a diabolical mind like his can induce a criminal to commit suicide with a simple speech (which is what he does with Miggs), why wouldn’t he also be capable of ruling the mind of “a young murderer in mutation”? There is a certain nostalgic tone in Lecter’s voice when he says these enigmatic words. Everything suggests that he had some participation in the “systematic abuses” that turned Gumb into a criminal. I emphasize the word “systematic,” which implies: intentional.

The movie is perhaps purposefully obscure about this point; but this only strengthens its tremendous psychological impact, as it opens the door of our imagination to the most terrifying speculations.

But the mythological references, which the movie is full of, speak in favor of the above hypothesis: Lecter is to Gumb what Crawford is to Clarice. He is his guru, the mind that shapes, educates, and directs him. He is the “spiritual” devil that acts secretly behind the “diabolical” soul.

Firstly, it is impossible not to see in Lecter, in the depth of his basement, a sort of lord of the underworld. From his dark cell, he intellectually controls much of what happens on the surface (he predicts the senator’s reaction, manipulates Shilton, plans the escape). If Lecter is thus a Pluto on his throne of shadows, who is Gumb?

The moths he breeds are of the species Acherontia styx. “Acheron” and “Styx” (the Latin and English keep the original Greek form styx) are the names of the two rivers that, in Greek myth, separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. In Greek religion, there was no “heaven,” no “paradise,” except for the rare heroes who managed, by extraordinary deeds, to rise above mortals and become demigods. All other humans were destined, after death, to an obscure and suffering existence in the realm of shadows, Hades. A variant of the word “Acheron” is “Charon” or “Charon”: the servant ferryman of hell, who crosses the dead, shouting at them, as in Dante’s poem:

Guai a voi, anime prave!

Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:

i’ vegno per menarvi all’altra riva

nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e in gelo.

"Woe to you, infamous souls!

Do not ever hope to see the sky:

What I come for is to take you to the other shore,

To the fire and the frost of the eternal darkness."

(Inferno, III: 84-87.)

Charon is a servant and disciple of Pluto, who, on the other hand, was later obviously identified with the biblical demon. The parallelism Pluto-Lecter/Charon-Gumb becomes inevitable when we notice that Gumb, after inserting into his victims' throats the cocoon of a moth with the names of the rivers of hell, takes them by boat and throws them into the depths of a river. From the other shore, from the bottom of his underground, the lord of darkness watches with evident satisfaction the progress of the “young murderer in transformation”.

Gumb is not just any murderer. He works with the aesthetic coherence of someone who has something more in view: he finishes off the crimes with a halo of symbols that give them the regularity and perfection of a magical rite. If he wanted the victims' skin only as raw material, why would he insert a symbol into their throats? And why did this symbol, for him, represent, in his own words, something “beautiful and powerful”?

To the mere physical and utilitarian aspect of the criminal operation, he added a symbolic support, obviously intended to summon the help of the dark powers for the success of the desired mutation. Who taught him these things? Who made the “young murderer in mutation” a mix of sorcerer and executioner? Who initiated him into the dark art? And why is there a Nazi flag in his house, which evokes, in the figure of the tailor of human skins, the executioners who, also driven by sinister “esoteric” motives, removed the skin from Jewish prisoners and ordered them sewn into artistic lampshades? Gumb’s crimes thus move away from the most obvious and utilitarian psychological motivation, to acquire a gloomy symbolic resonance, which, in the words of warning from Dr. Lecter himself, conceal something “much more disturbing”.

12. Angels and Demons

At this point, there’s no more escape: this mere “well-constructed thriller,” according to critics, this commonplace “fable of desire,” conceals nothing less than a struggle of the devas and the asuras, the cosmic war between the luminous and dark powers that contest the human soul and determine its destiny. At this point, the reader should be warned that this is not a simple police and psychological drama, which can be watched from a distance in the tranquility of a simple spectator. At this point, the “spectator,” tied to the armchair by a mixture of pain and panic, already knows that he has been stirred to the core: de te fabula narratur – “the story is about you.”

Even the characters' names seem significant. Clarice Starling, obviously, evokes stellar clarity. In Greek myth, the souls of heroes are transformed into stars. Lecter is a variant of lector: he reads in books and souls. Gumb is a corruption of gumbe, a type of Sudanese drum made… of skin. Finally, Crawford, a banal name that could mean nothing, is composed of craw, “throat,” and to ford, “to cross.” It clearly forms the idea of “swallow.” Why “swallow?” It may have been chosen at random, but isn’t it a suggestive coincidence that the most important clue to the mystery’s solution is found precisely in the victims' throats? Moreover, it may seem crazy, but I can’t get out of my head that Crawford dominates Clarice, who dominates Lecter, who dominates Gumb: one fish swallows another fish, which swallows another fish, which swallows another fish. In the end, the biggest fish withdraws, alone.

It is also significant that there is a kitten in the house of Gumb’s first victim, and another in the last. A kitten meows from Catherine’s window while Gumb kidnaps her; a kitten meows in Frederika Bimmel’s room while Clarice searches it for clues. A cat at the beginning, another at the end of the skin-flayer’s career. Like the two ends of a snake. The cat was indeed assimilated to the snake in Egyptian myth; and in Japan, shintô sees it as a malevolent being, a creature of darkness, capable of killing a woman and taking her form. Like Gumb. And he is not without interest in Japanese things, like the butterfly mobile that spins in his room.

What was said about the names and the cats points only to secondary indications to confirm a hypothesis which, moreover, and by itself, remains perfectly solid without them. It also sometimes happens that, when the structure of the initiatory narrative is firm, as in this case, even symbolic details accidentally found by the artist acquire a deeper reverberation: when you get the essential right, the accidental collaborates, or: help yourself, and heaven will help you. When, on the other hand, the deep structure is loose or flawed, not all the esoteric symbols in the world will save a work from getting lost in banality and impotence. Here is Paulo Coelho who does not let me lie.

13. Sheep and Goats

What is not accidental in any way is the parallelism between Lecter’s victims and Gumb’s. Lecter’s victims are all police people or connected to the repressive apparatus. Their death “makes sense,” being in this way an aspect of “justice,” albeit monstrous and twisted. Gumb’s victims are innocent girls: their only fault is being fat, having plenty of skin. Their death is “absurd,” “unjust,” and for this reason they are clearly compared to lambs, traditional symbols of the innocent sacrificial victim. Isn’t it then significant that on the night of his escape Lecter orders undercooked lamb chops for dinner, and that, instead of eating them, he eats the guards instead, that is, instead of the symbol of the innocent victims he eats the guilty victims? In this apocalyptic image, the innocent and the guilty are separated, like in the Final Judgment: the rams and the goats. Gumb, the irrational, the absurd, kills the lambs. Lecter knows what he’s doing: he prefers the goats.

Gumb became a killer because of suffering. He kills the lambs in a desperate attempt to save himself from an odious identity that oppresses him. The most interesting parallel in the movie may perhaps be the one formed, in this sense, between him and Catherine. It’s a structural element, not accidental. Catherine, in the depths of despair and terror, takes possession of Gumb’s poodle puppy and threatens to kill it. The puppy, white and curly, is a perfect little lamb. The larger scheme of the plot, reproduced on a small scale in this detail, gives it the strength and reach of a universal symbol uniting the micro and the macrocosm: persecuted and mistreated by demons, man persecutes and mistreats an innocent animal. But Catherine is saved, and along with her the little puppy: the “useless” gesture of the young Clarice, in trying to rescue the little lamb, finally finds its satisfactory response. Nothing was in vain.

14. To the End of the World

The victory of Clarice, which is also Crawford’s, seems only incomplete because Lecter escapes. But there is no literary tradition in the world that concludes an initiatory narrative with the final extinction of all the demons. The initiatory narrative can “announce” the apocalypse, but not “realize” it: there is always an opening for the continuation of the story (in the epic genre, this is, by the way, a constitutive law). Lecter, simply, could not die. But his escape, if it’s a victory before the world, is a confession of defeat before Clarice. After idealizing and serving her, Lecter now confesses that he fears her: on the phone, he asks her not to look for him. She answers: “You know I can’t promise that.” Of course: it would be against all rules. The woman’s struggle with the serpent, initiated at the creation of the world, must continue until the end of time. From Genesis to Revelation. Starting with the advantage for the serpent, in the Garden of Eden, it can only end, with the final victory of the woman, when the consummation of the ages occurs.

15. Apocalypse and Parody

There are those who say, however, that it was Lecter who won: that he, besides managing to escape, also psychologically dominated Clarice and, to top it off, managed to awaken in her, with a simple touch of his finger, something that wouldn’t be too much to call, literally, a devilish lust.

This is a devilish exaggeration, rather. Lecter himself has already responded to these people, by commenting: “They will say we are in love.” They will, indeed, because there are no limits to human stupidity. The only attempt to eroticize the relationship between Lecter and Clarice comes from him, and it is ironic, for those who perceive it. Hand touch by hand touch, there is a much more prolonged one between Clarice and Crawford, in the end, and moreover accompanied by a look of restrained emotion. And, oedipal projection by oedipal projection, it would be much more logical for Clarice to be attracted to Crawford, a policeman like her father and, in the end, his representative. In none of the memories that Clarice has of her father does he show anything that could remind her of Lecter, not even remotely. These people are seeing things.

On the other hand, whoever interpreted the relationship between Lecter and Clarice in an erotic sense does not see what would be absurd, ridiculous, and aesthetically ineffective about the hypothesis of a scatterbrained young woman, burning with unconfessed desires, managing to subjugate the devil and put him at her service by the mere force of a human, all too human, lust. This would only be possible with Grande Otelo playing Clarice and Oscarito playing Lecter. No matter how demoralized he is, the devil is not some old drooler to be melting for a flirt. It doesn’t match Lecter. If he yields before Clarice, it is not out of erotic desire, but because he has found within her a superior strength, which she herself does not know she has. The Holy Virgin is, after all, traditionally represented with one of her feet pinning the head of the serpent to the ground. Note: she does not kill the demon, she merely subdues him. Why should we expect more from Clarice Starling?

Moreover, sexualizing the relationships between Lecter and Clarice can only seem comforting to certain mindsets, which claim to be esprits forts, but are actually timid. They cannot admit the existence of evil in all its absurd presence, and prefer to reduce everything to a more manageable scale of almost harmless childish passions. It would be good if Dr. Freud explained everything, but Freud did not explain the devil and actually was scared shitless of these “dark things,” as he confessed to Jung. Lecter, in fact, despises physical sexuality, is disgusted by it, as can be seen by the fact that he kills the psychopath Miggs just to punish him for the obscene joke he made with Clarice (which is very characteristic of the kind of “diabolical justice,” disproportionate and absurd, that some take as justice itself). No, what there is between Lecter and Clarice is not lust. Unlike the Indians of the famous joke by Noel Nutels, the devil does not eat anyone except orally.

But it is not surprising that at least part of the audience, fearing to see the terrible truths that this film conveys to us, prefer to numb their consciousness, falling on their knees before the hypnotic attraction of evil: “they will enthrone the Beast,” says the Apocalypse. This temptation, which stirs in the depths of the terrified contemporary man’s soul, comes to the surface in the face of such a disturbing provocation as the one posed to us by Jonathan Demme’s film. Certain interpretations given to this story come from a tragic inner mistake: the viewer, unable to serenely admit a quota of evil greater than what he imagines possible, ends up seeking relief in an inverted reaction, exchanging repugnance for fascination. He falls victim to Lecter, and then seeks to justify himself by attributing the same reaction to Clarice.

The film does not completely close this door to those who wish to enter through it. A certain publicity, lethal to weak minds, is part of the constitutive rule of initiatory narratives: there is not a single one of them that does not possess, at its core, a potential for inverted interpretation, false and obscuring, at the disposal of those who wish to deceive themselves. The Canadian critic Northrop Frye, who is in the world who studied this narrative genre most deeply, categorically states: “Every apocalyptic image has a parody or demonic counterpart, and vice versa”.74 The national criticism, as a whole, decided to understand this work only in its parody. Certainly, I should not be accused of hostility when I warn these critics that there is, at the core of their choice – beyond ignorance of the laws of narrative, an unforgivable thing in a critic – also a moral and psychological decision of the most serious, and so much more serious as it is taken with complete unconsciousness of its deep implications: de te fabula narratur.

16. A Tip from Aristotle

One more word about genre. The genre is defined by the structure. In this sense, The Silence of the Lambs has in common with other police films and novels nothing but the subject. The structure is different. Comparisons with Hitchcockian thriller are also not fitting, which flowed from critics' mouths at the first examination. Hitchcock’s stories always follow the same scheme, of an ordinary hero who finds himself, by chance, involved in complex and adverse circumstances. The war of Clarice and Crawford against Lecter and Gumb is, at least, a confrontation between armies of equal power, with a small but significant advantage for the good side.

Aristotle might help us at this point. He conceived a classification of narratives, which was never used until Northrop Frye decided to apply it to the whole of Western literature, with impressive results. He distinguished them into five modalities, depending on the degree of power of the characters:

  1. Mythic modality: the hero is a god, demigod, or aspect of God.

  2. Legendary modality: the hero is a mere human being, but closely assisted by transcendent powers.

  3. High imitative modality: the hero is a human being of exceptional stature, so that, without the explicit aid of extraterrestrial forces (which may, however, be implied), he can perform extraordinary actions.

  4. Low imitative modality: the hero is an ordinary human being, with no superior powers to the reader nor any divine assistance.

  5. Ironic modality: the hero has less power than the reader; he is incapable or a victim of circumstances.

From the comparison between the Hitchcockian thriller and The Silence of the Lambs, the difference is striking: this decidedly belongs to the high imitative modality, that to the low imitative. Clarice is, as Jodie Foster pointed out, a true heroine.

But this does not entirely solve the problem of genre. At the beginning of the article, I spoke of Greek tragedy, but it is clear that The Silence of the Lambs is not a tragedy; and, if it achieves the same effect of “terror and pity”, it is by means totally different from those employed by Greek theater, and not without a final touch of relief, truly comical, when we see Lecter in a red wig stalking to dine on Chilton.

17. A Little of Everything

Tragedy, comedy, police, thriller: the film seems to mix a little of everything. However, if we pay attention to its structure, we will see that it is similar to Gil Vicente’s Auto da Alma: the Devil and Christ fight for the possession of a human soul (Catherine, which incidentally means “purity”). The same basic scheme is present in many other medieval plays, and if Goethe and Thomas Mann decided to imitate it in their respective Fausts, it is because Faust is a medieval legend. The brutality, all the bloodshed, is also medieval: the man of the Middle Ages was accustomed to spectacles that today would seem repulsive to us: he delighted in public executions, processions of flagellants and lepers, and he continually thought about wars, deaths, and epidemics, which were part of his everyday life. The hygiene of the bourgeois era banned these images, which were once part of the fabric of life, and, of course, habitual scenes in the theater. A certain raw brutality of Shakespeare’s theater was repeatedly qualified by historians as a remaining medieval element.

The mere fact of having introduced this genre into cinema, dressing it with police matter, would have already made The Silence of the Lambs a memorable moment. But, here, the ternary model of the medieval Autos appears revised and potentiated by the addition of an original touch, which cures it of its congenital schematicism, of its “naivety”, and gives it an uncommon dramatic force: it is that each of the three archetypes – Christ, Devil, and Man – does not simply appear represented by a character, but duplicated, each unfolded into two opposing and complementary aspects, forming their meeting a highly explosive crossing of three axes of contradictions. More than any explanation, a diagram can account for the complex and tightly tied structure of this story.

This diagram should be imagined as a horizontal disc, crossed by a vertical axis I and cut horizontally by two other axes, II and III:

Axis I is that of guilt and innocence: on top, Gumb’s victims; below, Lecter’s.

Axis II represents Evil, III the Good. However, the horizontal disc also has a white part, which represents the Spirit, or universal forces, and a dark part, which represents the world of corporeality where particular actions take place. There is, therefore, a spiritual evil (Lecter) and a bodily evil (Gumb), which disputes with a spiritual good (Crawford, or knowledge) and a bodily good (Clarice, or moral action) the possession of the soul, divided in turn between guilt (goats) and innocence (lambs). The central or neutral point, needless to say, is Catherine, who has in her the power of guilt and innocence.

I believe there is no need to explain this diagram in more detail, as it speaks for itself. However, some conclusions can be drawn from it, which are relevant to the appreciation of the work.

  1. While in the usual thriller the conflict of good and evil is trivialized into a simple struggle of cops and robbers, here, on the contrary, a crime story is expanded and potentiated in a dialectical mirroring that, dramatically condensing all the ambiguities and contradictions in which evil presents itself as good and eventually transforms into it, ends up elevating the whole to the dimensions of a cosmic power struggle for the decision of human fate.

  2. The septenary structure of the set is repeated on a small scale in the details of the narrative at least three times: there are seven victims of Gumb, seven policemen surround Clarice as she goes up the elevator for the interview with Crawford (dressed in red), another seven (dressed in black) at the Elk River police station.

  3. The septenary scheme, or six-pointed cross, which is normally used in astronomy for the description of the celestial sphere, is considered in symbolism a kind of “symbol of symbols,” a hermeneutic tool with which the structuring key of works of art, institutions, philosophical systems, etc. can be found. The popular mystification of the number 7 is a parody of this symbol. It is also clear that the artistic exploitation of this structure poses problems of great difficulty, which only a first-rate artist can overcome.

  4. The same diagram can be described in several ways, including by inverting the positions and putting into motion the games and dynamisms between the various poles. Only this would allow a detailed understanding of the narrative structure, but, obviously, it would be too extensive a study to be undertaken here.

  5. The various symbols that the narrative employs only achieve their full effectiveness because the structure, as a whole, is symbolic. The septenary structure of the directions of space from a central point has, since antiquity, been considered a sufficiently broad and cohesive model with which to describe the entire structure of man, as can be seen by the correspondence between the seven planets of ancient astrology, human cognitive faculties75 and the seven Liberal Arts that summarized the essentials of medieval education76. The relationship between particular symbols and the overall structure is the touchstone for knowing whether we are dealing with an authentic initiatory narrative or a crude imitation with undue “esoteric” pretensions.

18. Adapting the Novel

The interpretation presented here, I said a few paragraphs ago, stands regardless of some of the secondary reasons I gave to support it. This, however, does not prevent me from adding others, less as proof than as illustration.

Very instructive, for example, is the comparison between the film script and Thomas Harris’s original novel77. The cinematic adaptation of the literary work is always an occasion for cuts and additions which, when they prove to be obedient to some fixed pattern or criterion, reveal much about the aesthetic principles of the filmmaker, which can be very different from those of the writer. This is precisely the case. Director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally changed so much in the original story, that they made their film an independent work, inspired by various and even opposite motifs to those of Harris. However, more than this, the modifications they introduced follow a uniformity of meaning, which allows us to easily discern the spirit that guided them. I do not believe I am wrong when I say that their main result (therefore as their main meaning) was to transpose the narrative, from the low imitative mode, to the high imitative mode.

The deepest differences are shown in the Table which comes as Appendix III of this work, so there is no need to expose them here. However, the reader, examining the Table, will verify whether I am not right in drawing the above conclusion from them. I can only add a few words of explanation.

Significantly, the screenwriter amputated from the story all references to intimate motivations and immediate personal circumstances, which could make the acts of the central characters, Clarice, Crawford, Lecter, and Gumb, more easily explainable in terms of psychology (or psychopathology). Therefore, he erased from the narrative its element of psychological realism, which is one of the trademarks of the low imitative. Amputated from sick or healthy psychological motivations, the actions perhaps lose in verisimilitude (according to the standards of average probability that mark the aesthetics of the low imitative), but they gain in symbolic reach. The characters, not acting according to psychological causes reducible to the scale of the average humanity – the average sane man or the average psychopath –, become, literally, extraordinary beings: giants in struggle. From the average or typical, we move to the archetype.

The difference in modality imposes, on the critic, a difference in focus. The low imitative deals, essentially, with what in the human being can be reduced to general, statistical or typical causes (for example, to heredity, in Zola’s Rougon-Maquart; to class struggle, in Gorki’s The Mother; to the decline of family property in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; to the vulgarity of petty bourgeois sentimentality in Madame Bovary, etc.). With the high imitative (and from it upwards, in the Aristotle-Frye scale), we escape from this band: we face what is ideal, unusual, exceptional; with what impresses us by greatness and not by plausibility; with what, in short, cannot be reduced to a general rule, an average, or a typology. For example, you can psychologically or sociologically explain Madame Bovary’s behavior, without any detriment to the aesthetic apprehension of the work; it should be done, because this aesthetic apprehension only becomes complete, precisely, after the psychological and sociological understanding of the causes at play, which the character’s behavior illustrates as an example of a general rule. But the same interpretative procedure fails when applied to Hamlet, Faust or Prince Myshkin; facing them, the more we try to reduce them to expressions of general laws, the more we miss what is essential and significant about them. This is why the psychological approach is irrelevant or fails in the case of The Silence of the Lambs: it gets lost in marginal speculations, lets the essential slip away. Madame Bovary is a type; and a type is explained by the general rule it typifies. Hamlet, Myshkin (or Lecter) are symbols; and symbols, as Susanne K. Langer78 well summarized, are matrices of intellections: they are intended to open up to intelligence new possibilities of understanding and explanation, and not to be in turn caught in the grid of some pre-existing explanation. Explaining Lecter by pathology or Clarice by hidden desire is to reduce the symbol to type, to artificially apply to high imitative narrative a standard of explanatory plausibility that only fits in the case of low imitative.

In the Table, the reader will find many other indications in the same direction as I have explained (for example, from the book to the movie the center of interest moved from the investigation of Gumb’s hiding place to the deciphering of his secret intention; that is, from physical action to intellectual tension; etc. etc.). I see no need to carry on this comparison myself, which he can perform on his own and with great benefit.

19. Imago Mundi

In short: The Silence of the Lambs is a narrative of the high imitative modality, structured according to a model that suggests the medieval Autos (Christ, Devil, and Soul), and here is enhanced by the dialectical resource of character unfolding, forming a sevenfold structure similar to the directions of space; it is an initiatory narrative, realized with fullness of means and extreme happiness in the use of traditional symbols of religion and mythologies. It is an authentic imago hominis, or imago mundi. It is great art. Its vision inspires us with terror and pity, predisposes us to a deepened consciousness of the forces that preside over destiny and, in this sense, makes us more human. Its hermeneutics, here only outlined on a provisional basis, is an exercise of self-awareness that demands from us (besides the necessary scientific knowledge) a firmness of purpose and a disposition to find the truth, finally an inner attitude whose symbol the work itself provides us with, in the person of Clarice Starling. This exercise is also the occasion to remember something that is out of fashion: the moral and pedagogical sense of all great art.

That this sense can be lost in the trivialization and pedantry that today are the keynote of intellectual life in Brazil, is a regrettable harm, which I tried to compensate here with the resources I had.

Appendix 1: The Apology of the State

A venerable tradition of Brazilian criticism commands us to look at all things from their political and ideological side. I do not intend to shirk this commandment (whose obedience, by the way, was demanded of me by more than one listener to the lectures), although, obviously, the ideological approach is not the most fruitful for understanding this film (if it were I would have done an ideological analysis, and not symbolic, since, according to the old scholastic adage, it is the nature of the object that should determine the method of studying it).

Sociologically, the most obvious thing in the story is that there are only two social groups in it: criminals on one side, public servants on the other. There are no workers, bosses, or middle class. The class struggle is absent, either from the plot or from the structure of consciousness (or the unconscious) of the characters. The story could take place indifferently in a capitalist or socialist country, since only one condition is required and it is met in both cases: the existence of a state order and a banditry capable of threatening it. The conflict is summed up in the war between the State and the bandits, presented more generically as a confrontation of reason with violence, of human with anti-human, of order with chaos: it is the polis fighting against the invasion of dark forces.

The State is presented here as a symbol and epitome of reason, state order as the prototype of a humanized world: man’s shelter. Banditry, on the other hand, has a dual root: supernatural (or, more precisely, preternatural, to use the technical term theologians use to distinguish the diabolical) and historical. The preternatural emerges in allusions to magic; the historical in the fleeting but significant mention of Nazism. The film is theologically accurate in presenting the Devil as an enemy, not precisely of God, but of man (and, by extension, the polis, if we consider, with Hegel, that the State is the most characteristic creation of the most characteristically human faculty). And that Nazism and diabolism are fundamentally one and the same, is something that can be seriously suspected, especially after reading two classics on the subject: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West, by Hermann Rauschning79 and The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh R. Trevor-Roper80.

As for the identification of the State with human order (and, by extension, with Good), the times when ideological misunderstanding led to labeling Hegel as an apologist for totalitarianism are long gone: Hegel is rather the inventor of the modern notion of the Rule of Law. Read Éric Weil, Hegel et l’État.81

The Silence of the Lambs is, ideologically, an apology for the Hegelian Rule of Law against the “superman” from the underground, who rises, thirsty for blood, to implement the reign of atavistic terror and establish a religion of magical rites, where human sacrifice attempts in vain to appease the hunger of insatiable dark deities. It is, in a way, Hegel against Nietzsche. If you want to know my position, I am with the former and won’t budge.

Appendix 2: Plot Summary

  1. Clarice Starling, a police intern, exercises in a forest behind the FBI headquarters in Quantico. Called for an interview with the head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, she crosses the forest entrance, where three wooden signs nailed to the trees exhort the aspiring agent to endure pain, agony, and suffering. A fourth sign orders: love.

  2. Dressed in a sky-blue blouse, she goes up by elevator, surrounded by seven male aspiring agents, in red blouses.

In the boss’s office, she sees newspaper clippings on the walls in which the killer known as “Buffalo Bill” is identified as the author of heinous crimes: for the fifth time, he has just killed a young woman and skinned the corpse, leaving it in a river.

The boss, Jack Crawford, who was Clarice’s professor at the university, proposes a task that can help her earn a promotion to special agent: make a psychological profile of another killer, Hannibal Lecter, who is imprisoned in the judicial asylum. Lecter, a famous psychiatrist, had become even more famous for the monstrous nature of his crimes: he killed people with bites and ate parts of his victims' bodies, hence his nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal” (which creates assonance in English). Due to his knowledge and cunning, Lecter was a difficult case for the asylum’s psychologists and did not collaborate with attempts to probe his mind.

Clarice accepts the offer, and Crawford warns her to be very careful with Lecter, especially avoiding telling him anything about her personal life.

  1. Accompanied by Dr. Frederick Chilton, the asylum’s director, a boastful would-be charmer, Clarice goes to the asylum’s basement to interview Lecter. As Chilton says that Lecter hates him and considers him his Nemesis, Clarice prefers to conduct the interview alone. She crosses the “corridor of death”, where insane murderers watch her from behind bars. One of them, Miggs, nicknamed “Multiple Miggs” (implying: “Multiple Erections”) yells obscenities at her.

At the end of the corridor, she sees Dr. Hannibal, in a cell that, instead of bars (through which he could stick his hands), is separated from the corridor by thick armored glass, with holes for breathing.

Very polite, but with a malicious smile, Lecter tries to probe Clarice’s mind instead of being probed by her. From a brief examination of her clothes and the smell of her perfume, he outlines her socio-economic profile and from there concludes traits of her personality: behind her “acquired good taste” and her appearance of professionalism and maturity, he reveals in Clarice the shy and ambitious country girl.

Clarice accepts the profile without objections and, recognizing Lecter’s psychological knowledge, says she wishes to learn from him. Lecter then says that Crawford, deep down, had only sent her there to obtain psychological information about Buffalo Bill. Despite the pleasantries, Lecter refuses to answer the tests that Clarice gives him, reacts impatiently when she challenges him to know himself as well as he knew her, and says goodbye to her in a tone of disdainful arrogance.

As Clarice leaves through the corridor, Multiple Miggs tries to attract her attention, saying he had just bitten his own wrist to commit suicide. She comes closer to look and, as soon as she realizes that Miggs is masturbating, gets a jet of sperm on her face.

Lecter, from the back of the corridor, perceives what is happening, calls Clarice back, apologizes for Miggs' rudeness, and offers her something like a consolation prize for her failed attempt to probe him: emphasizing the phrase “look within yourself”, he provides her with the name of one of his former patients, Miss Mofet (implying it’s a clue to catch Buffalo Bill).

  1. She leaves the interview disturbed, and memories of her father, a policeman killed by bandits when she was ten years old, pass through her mind.

The next day, she learns from Crawford that Miggs committed suicide during the night, induced by Lecter.

Clarice investigates the Hannibal case, but as the psychiatrist had destroyed his file, she finds nothing about this Miss Mofet. Remembering, however, the expression “look within yourself”, she gets the idea to go investigate a set of storages called Yourself and there she discovers a warehouse rented years before by a Miss Hester Mofet, which had remained closed ever since.

In the storage room, she finds, among old photo albums and mannequins dressed in extravagant women’s clothing, a severed human head, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

  1. She returns to the basement for a second interview with Lecter. She wants to know why he tricked her while simultaneously helping her: after all, as she had discovered, Miss Hester Mofet didn’t exist, it was just an anagram of the rest of me. Whose was the corpse?

Lecter compliments her on her cleverness and informs her that the head belonged to his former patient, Benjamin Raspail, who was Buffalo Bill’s lover, then a “budding killer in mutation” (Lecter does not explain what he means by this).

Lecter, while offering help to capture Buffalo Bill, continues trying to probe Clarice’s mind. This time he wants to know about Crawford’s sexual interest in her. As always, she responds with candor.

At the end of the interview, Lecter says Buffalo Bill is already on the trail of his next victim.

  1. Buffalo Bill kidnaps his new victim. After knocking her unconscious, he tears her blouse and, in ecstasy, examines the skin of her back. The only witness to the kidnapping is a kitten.

  2. Clarice again interrupts a training session to answer a call from Crawford. He summons her to perform an autopsy on a girl’s body, found skinless and floating in a river in West Virginia.

On the way, Clarice formulates theories about Buffalo Bill’s psychology. Crawford implicitly admits that he only sent her to interview Lecter in order to obtain information about the killer, apologizing for not having informed her about the purpose of the mission: he explains that, if she were aware of this purpose, Lecter could read her thoughts and manipulate her.

At the wake in Elk River, West Virginia, Clarice stays in the room, surrounded by seven guards in black uniforms, while Crawford talks to the local sheriff. In an adjacent compartment, there are people mourning a young man’s death. Clarice is reminded of her father once again.

With the help of Crawford and local employees, Clarice conducts an autopsy on the found girl. In the victim’s throat, she finds a moth cocoon, which could not have ended up there naturally.

  1. In a Museum of Natural History, an entomologist identifies the cocoon for Clarice: it belongs to a type of moth, the Acherontia styx, which lives in Asia and could only have ended up in West Virginia by the hands of a breeder.

Meanwhile, in Buffalo Bill’s house, a desperate voice can be heard, crying out for help from the bottom of a well.

  1. On TV, Clarice learns that the girl recently kidnapped by Buffalo Bill (the seventh victim) must still be alive: it’s Catherine Martin, daughter of Senator Ruth Martin, who, on national network, makes dramatic appeals to Buffalo Bill’s compassion and generosity.

  2. Clarice returns for the third time to the asylum’s basement, where she applies a ruse conceived by Crawford: she tells Lecter that the senator offers him a transfer to a more comfortable prison if he helps capture Buffalo Bill. Lecter, curious and genuinely fascinated by Clarice proposes a deal: tit for tat (quid pro quo, as he says), he will tell her everything she wants to know about Buffalo Bill if she tells him everything he wants to know about her. Contrary to Crawford’s instructions, she accepts. She begins to talk about her childhood, recounts the death of her mother and father, and her unhappy life as an orphan living with relatives.

In return, Lecter says the moth is a symbol of transformation. Buffalo Bill aspires to transformation and beauty. He is not a born killer, but became a killer due to “systematic abuse” suffered in childhood. He hated his identity and sought to change it. He imagined himself as a transsexual, but he wasn’t. He was, deep down, something disturbing and sinister.

  1. Buffalo Bill, at his home, is sewing something on a machine. From the bottom of the well, the screams sound more and more distressed. Indifferent to the screams, Buffalo Bill throws a bottle of lotion to the bottom of the well, ordering Catherine to apply the lotion to her back. Catherine, mad with fear, obeys.

  2. Dr. Chilton, jealous of being excluded from the investigations, had recorded Clarice’s last conversation with Lecter through a hidden microphone, decides to take advantage of the situation. He contacts the senator, exposing the ruse in which Crawford had involved her name, and gets from her a similar offer, this time genuine. Anticipating the success and prestige he will gain from this move, he conveys the offer to Lecter. Lecter accepts, but demands a direct meeting with the senator.

  3. In a straitjacket and wearing a hockey mask as a muzzle – giving him a monstrous appearance compatible with his psyche -, Lecter has a meeting with the Senator at the airport in Memphis, Tennessee. He gives her false information about the identity and whereabouts of Buffalo Bill and even makes a sinister joke about one of her breasts which, according to him, was removed shortly after Catherine’s breastfeeding. The senator is deeply shaken.

  4. Lecter is transferred to a cage on the 5th floor of the Shelby County Courthouse, Tennessee, while awaiting removal to the more comfortable jail promised to him.

Clarice goes to find him, against the guards' wishes, to protest the falsity of the information given to the senator (she had noticed that the name provided by Lecter was just an anagram for iron sulfide, or pyrite, the “fool’s gold” — it had all been a joke). She demands the real information. Lecter reminds her of their deal, and in turn demands new information about Clarice’s childhood.

Anxious because of the urgency, as she knows that they will come to get Lecter in a few minutes, Clarice agrees to respond. She then tells that, at the farm where she had moved to after her father’s death, she woke up one night hearing screams of fear. She had then gone to the barn and found out that the screams were coming from lambs and sheep that were being slaughtered by the farmer. So she had opened the gate for the lambs to escape, but, dazed, they didn’t run: they just stayed there, screaming. Clarice had then taken one of them in her arms and ran with it into the woods, hoping to save at least one. But it was useless: the police eventually caught her and the lamb, returned to its owner, was slaughtered like the others.

Lecter then says that, in trying to save Catherine from Buffalo Bill’s hands, Clarice is trying to repeat the utopian good deed of childhood: saving the entire flock with just one sheep. He guesses that she still wakes up sometimes in the early hours of the morning, hearing the terrified screams of the sheep. Clarice, as always, admits that he is right.

When Clarice demands her part of the deal from Lecter, he starts talking about Buffalo Bill. He advises Clarice, quoting the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to focus on the essence of the problem, disregarding the accidental. The killer, Buffalo Bill, is accidental; the essential part is the greed, and “we only covet what we see frequently.”

When Clarice finally demands the name of the killer, it’s too late: Dr. Chilton is already entering with the guards to take her away.

As she is pulled out by the guards, Clarice, screaming, still demands the name of the killer from Lecter, and he calmly responds that everything is already in the dossier about Buffalo Bill that Clarice had given him. She frees herself from the guards and runs back to grab the papers from Lecter’s hand. At that moment, he takes the opportunity to touch Clarice’s hand with his index finger.

  1. Lecter is well treated in his new residence. In his cell at Shelby, he has books, a recorder playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and good food. On the table are his drawings (he is an excellent artist): one of them shows Clarice, with a halo of light around her head and a little lamb in her lap. Like an icon.

Lecter had requested a second dinner, and the guards come to bring it: undercooked lamb chops. What they don’t know is that Lecter, somehow, had stolen a pen from Dr. Chilton and made a key with its clip. When they handcuff him in a corner of the cell to place the tray on the table, he easily frees himself, handcuffs one of the guards to the cell bars, and attacks the other, killing him with bites, shaking his head between his teeth like a dog devouring a rat. Then he turns against the other guard and kills him with blows.

Gunshots are heard, and the alarm sounds. A brave sergeant advances through the corridors, armed, and upon reaching the cell, he sees, horrified, one of the guards crucified on the bars, with his face torn apart and his guts exposed, while the other one agonizes on the floor.

A SWAT team searches the building for Lecter. They find a body on top of the elevator, which they believe to be Lecter’s, but meanwhile, Lecter, in an ambulance, removes the scalp of one of the guards, which he had used to cover his face, and devours the paramedics, escaping. It was he who fired the shots to mislead the police, then dressed as a guard.

  1. Clarice talks to her friend Ardelia Mapp and assures her that Lecter won’t come looking for her because she would be “too vulgar for him.” Ardelia finds a note from Lecter in the dossier about the map showing the locations where Buffalo Bill’s victims were found. The computer finds no regular pattern in the distribution of these places, and Lecter wrote: “Isn’t there a deliberate disorder in the choice of locations?” That was it.

While discussing with Ardelia, Clarice remembers Lecter’s phrase: “We only covet what we see frequently.” She takes out a photograph from the dossier of Bill’s first victim, Frederika Bimmel. “So he knew her,” exclaims Ardelia.

  1. Clarice searches Frederika’s house. A kitten meows, looking for its owner. In the bedroom, Clarice sees a dress with a pattern of diamonds on the back, similar to the cuts made on the skin of one of the victims. Frederika was a seamstress. Suddenly, everything becomes clear: Bill was a seamstress too, and he knew Frederika from somewhere. He was making a “woman’s suit” with the skin of the victims. Rejected by gender reassignment centers for not presenting the personality traits of an authentic transsexual, he was trying to achieve the “transformation” he desired through his own means.

  2. Clarice reports the investigation’s findings to Crawford, but he is already on a plane heading to Calumet City, Ohio, where he believes Buffalo Bill is located. He already has his identity: his name is Jame Gumb, a indeed a seamstress, and he breeds moths. Crawford found a shipment of Acherontia styx moth eggs sent to Jame Gumb in Calumet City. Buffalo Bill must be there. Crawford thanks Clarice for her help, and the plane starts to land.

In Calumet City, a massive operation is set up to invade Gumb’s house and rescue Catherine. Meanwhile, around Frederika’s house, Clarice continues investigating. She discovers that Frederika worked for a Mrs. Lippman and goes to find Mrs. Lippman’s house.

In Calumet City, the SWAT team breaks into Gumb’s house, only to find it empty. In Mrs. Lippman’s house, they hear Catherine’s screams from the basement. She has just grabbed Gumb’s pet dog and threatens to kill it unless Gumb releases her or gives her a phone to call the police. In a fit of rage, Gumb goes to get his revolver to kill Catherine. Underneath a Nazi flag thrown among mannequins and dresses, he retrieves a large nickel-plated Colt and heads back towards the pit when the doorbell rings. It’s Clarice.

Gumb calmly answers the door and says he bought the house from Mrs. Lippman two years ago. As Clarice asks him for the address of Mrs. Lippman’s son, she sees some spools of thread on the table and an Acherontia styx moth fluttering around them. She pulls out her gun and arrests Gumb, but he escapes through the kitchen, grabs the Colt, and disappears into the basement.

With her gun drawn, Clarice searches the dark basement, finding a kind of mummy (Mrs. Lippman) in a bathtub, and eventually finds Catherine, who screams for help while the little dog continues to bark. Clarice continues to search for Gumb as the lights go out. In the darkness, Gumb watches her through military infrared binoculars. She trembles and leans against the wall. In the darkness, Gumb almost touches her hair. Suddenly, she hears the “click” of the Colt being cocked by Gumb. Without seeing anything, she fires the entire contents of her Magnum in that direction. One of the shots hits the window, and through the light, she sees Gumb writhing on the floor.

The police arrive, and Catherine is freed, escorted by the guards, wrapped in a blanket, with Gumb’s little white dog in her arms. Clarice follows closely behind.

  1. At the Department of Justice, the new FBI special agents, including Clarice and Ardelia, receive their diplomas. Crawford, modestly, watches from the back of the hallway.

Later, their colleagues throw a party in honor of Clarice. Crawford discreetly tells her that he doesn’t like parties and has to leave. He congratulates her, saying with restrained emotion that her father would be proud of what she did. Then they say their goodbyes. We see their hands touching.

Clarice answers the phone. It’s Dr. Lecter. He says he won’t come after her because “the world is more interesting with her,” and asks that she also be kind enough not to look for him. She replies, “You know I can’t promise that, sir.” Lecter says goodbye, mentioning he’s waiting for a friend “for dinner,” and hangs up. Clarice calls after him, but the phone is silent.

Dr. Lecter, disguised as a tourist, appears in some place in Africa or Haiti. He disembarks from a plane, very concerned about security, waiting for the “friend” he invited for dinner: Dr. Chilton. Lecter follows him from a distance.

Appendix 3: The Hand Touch

One thing I forgot to mention, but which may be important, is about the mentioned hand touch between Lecter and Clarice. Many interpreted it as a sign of eroticism. I have already demonstrated that it couldn’t be; so, what is it, then?

I suggest that the reader rewatch the movie and carefully observe the gestures. Lecter extends his index finger and lightly touches Clarice’s hand. The screen seems to glow, and the brief moment reverberates outside of time.

Now, take a look at a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (Sistine Chapel ceiling) and observe the detail where God’s hand touches Adam’s hand, infusing the newly created man with the breath of life.

Doesn’t it look similar?

The index finger corresponds, in symbolic palmistry, to Jupiter, the star of priestly authority. Its touch signifies blessing, the mark of election, the descent of an illuminating spiritual influence. It has the same sense as Zeus' lightning bolt, the revelation that strikes those who flee from truth and enlightens those who seek it.

The hand touch through the cell bars in Shelby County precedes, precisely, the intuitive explosion in which Clarice, until then lost in the obscure web of false clues, perceives the first glimmer of truth, putting her on the right track to the criminal (I refer to the moment when she examines the map, with the help – get this! – of Miss Mapp).

God creates man from the darkness of nothingness and then infuses him with the light of intelligence with a touch of the index finger. This the Demon cannot do. However, he can create a simulacrum, a miniature copy, artificially constructing a web of enigmatic obscurities and letting man struggle within it, only to then pull him out with a hand touch that suddenly clarifies everything. The ordering intuition is, mutatis mutandis, a recreation of the world. Lecter plays God, bringing light to Clarice’s mind from the darkness. The touch of the index finger is the ritual blessing that crowns the initiatory process. The heroine doesn’t realize what just happened; taken away by the guards, she protests, saying that Lecter still owes her something. But he smiles because he knows he has already given her the final touch: soon, the fog will begin to clear.

He mocks, of course. But with such elegance!

Appendix 4: Woman as a Symbol of Intelligence

Caged Heat, an earlier film by Jonathan Demme, which I was unaware of at the time when I wrote the first edition of this text, fully confirms the interpretations I offered in it. It’s a frankly bad movie, with some notable moments. But what matters in this case is not the execution, but the thematic proposal. Overall and in details, it is the same as the story of Clarice Starling: the struggle of human intelligence against a hostile principle, diabolically rational in achieving irrational ends. Here too, intelligence is symbolized by a woman, or rather, a group of women, the inmates who seek to escape the brain reprogramming treatment practiced in prison by a wicked psychiatrist – a clumsy and shy anticipation, but significant, of Dr. Lecter. But if the class of psychiatrists seems to embody for Jonathan Demme the very figure of ill-intentioned cunning, prison directors personify the vain stupidity that devotion to a morality of appearances places, more or less involuntarily, at the service of evil: the director of the women’s prison is Dr. Chilton avant la lettre. In her as in him, the basic weakness that opens the flank to the action of the devil is the debauchery hidden under a veil of respectability. Only the proportions are inverted: in Chilton the veil is so transparent that the character’s efforts to make himself respectable become comical; whereas in the director the repressive self-censorship is a lead wall, whose weight makes her physically paralytic, and behind which desires can only express themselves in the veiled language of dreams. Added to the fact that the character is a beautiful and fragile woman, this ends up making her less a caricature like Chilton than the expressionist amplification of a tragic impotence to humanize herself. She inspires us with anger and pity – not contempt.

A significant inverse analogy is that, appearing here as forces in struggle exactly the same social classes of The Silence of the Lambs – delinquents versus public servants – the moral functions are inverted, with the marginals personifying human normality and the state bureaucracy servers embodying diabolical coldness. This clearly shows that the ideological background discerned in The Silence of the Lambs is not an essential element, but accidental, confirming what was said in Appendix I, that is, that in the analysis of this film the ideological point of view is not the most fruitful and should be subordinate to the symbolic and moral approach.

Comparing the two films, we see that if for Jonathan Demme the State can represent, on one hand, the order and security that protect the human being against the assaults of demonic violence, on the other hand, the filmmaker is aware that this order and security can also incorporate the machine-like coldness of a demonic device devoted to the destruction of the human in man. Meno male: those who feel the ambiguity of the Hegelian notion of the State – the matrix of liberal democracy as well as communism and fascism – can only breathe a sigh of relief to see how the correct intuition of the well-intentioned artist is a kind of instinctive protection against the temptation of misleading ideological simplisms.

What is rigorously the same in both films is the apology of normal and sane human intelligence, which, allied with basic moral qualities – loyalty, courage, absence of pretensions – can defeat both the slippery dialectic of Dr. Lecter and the police-psychiatric paraphernalia of the women’s prison. This synthesis of cognitive and active qualities receives the traditional name of frónesis, which translates as “prudence” or practical wisdom. In both films, it is represented by a woman (or a group of women) who fights and defeats diabolical forces of both “masculine” and “feminine” order: the penetrating cunning of Lecter is to the macabre passion of Gumb exactly as the sadistic coldness of the prison doctor is to the rancorous envy of the director.

The woman symbolizing wisdom: why? Because, well, no one needs a special reason to repeat a universal symbolism: the frónesis is the “greatness of the Earth” of the I Ching, it is Athena, it is the “strong woman” of the Bible, it is Beatrice and Laura, it is all that, after all, that the intellectual enragées of today will only be able to be on the day when the prison director can free herself from the wheelchair of arrogant pseudo-rationality, accept the path of loyal modesty and become a Clarice Starling.

Rio de Janeiro, May 23, 1995.

Appendix 5: Main Differences Between the Film and the Book

THE MOVIE
by Jonathan Demme		 THE NOVEL
by Thomas Harris
1. REGARDING THE CHARACTERS OF CLARICE AND CRAWFORD
a) Reduces the psychology of the two heroes to the most obvious rational motivations in the face of situations linked to the main plot; a) Dwells on details about side motivations (for example, Crawford’s sternness is attributed to his wife – omitted in the movie – being on her deathbed);
b) Clarice is self-controlled and objective in all situations. b) Clarice frequently experiences bouts of anger and a variety of other emotions.
2. REGARDING THE CHARACTER OF DR. LECTER
a) He speaks through symbols and anagrams, which Clarice has to decipher, like a disciple deciphering words of a guru; a) He simply tells lies or makes puns which, when deciphered by the FBI (and not by Clarice), reveal nothing more than bad-taste jokes;
b) Lives completely isolated from the world, like an animal at the bottom of his cell; b) Has extensive contact with the outside world, through correspondence with students who admire him and articles he sends to medical journals;
c) He gradually reveals the solution, so that only at the end does Clarice discover the intention of Buffalo Bill; c) Provides a ready and literal solution (“he is making a skin coat”) before the middle of the story, which from then on (pp. 137-319 of the Brazilian translation) only deals with the pursuit of a murderer whose psychological mystery has already been deciphered.

II. The Crime of Mother Agnes, or: The Confusion Between Spirituality and Psyche

Preface to the Second Edition

I have little to add or change in this little book of mine, twelve years old, for which I feel, among many others that I wrote in the past, paternal esteem. Please understand, a respect made less out of vain self-admiration than compassionate benevolence towards a young author who is no longer me; benevolence that both of us, me and him, would like to see shared by the reader facing a work that has no merit other than the intention that inspired it.

If I were to change something, I would convert the indigestible majestic or – well, look at that – modesty plural that at the time seemed to me the appropriate expression of the austere impersonality that should prevail in these matters, but which soon began to sound, and still sounds today, like an inelegant trick to give the personal views of a poor individual human an air of collective authority.

But no. Let it remain as it came into the world, skimmed only of some spelling errors and a few syntactic obscurities, as well as supplemented with footnotes that update the discussion as they can. It is an authentic manifestation of a thought that, in essence, still seems sufficiently true to me, and not entirely irrelevant.

To those who have read my "Symbols and myths in the movie The Silence of the Lambs", Mother Agnes82 can provide some useful points of comparison, as a first example of extending the same method of analysis to a work of a completely different nature, and different genre. This method consists, very simply, in applying the criteria of traditional symbolic hermeneutics, as well as my particular theory of genres83 derived from it, at the same time and inseparably to the individual symbols contained in a work and its global structure, and in seeking coherence between one thing and another. The literary work appears there as a monad, a symbolic microcosm, organized in the image and likeness of the entire universe, as seen by an artist according to the conventions prevailing in his time and the gifts of his personal imaginative intelligence. Those who read in sequence the book of genres, that of The Innocents, and this one, will better understand, I hope, the unity of the thought that inspires them.

Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that this unity is not only that of a method of literary investigation, but that of a philosophical conception about language, man, the cosmos and the infinite, of which the said method is nothing more than extension and illustration. The conception I am talking about is only briefly sketched here, in chapters 10, 11, and 12, but they are enough to make this little book, under the label of theatrical criticism, also – and almost involuntarily – a book of metaphysics.

Rio de Janeiro, October 1994.

Preface to the First Edition

I wrote this booklet to provide some points of reference to my Catholic students who, having watched John Pielmeyer’s play, Agnes of God, found themselves naturally perplexed at the impossibility of situating it within the Christian perspective which, however, it expressly claimed.

I wished to publish it with the play still in production (September 1982) and do so under a pseudonym. The first of these intentions explains, due to haste, the gaps and imperfections of the text, quite obscure in certain points; the second justifies the use of the majestic plural, a form which I recognize as quite unfriendly and more suitable for ministerial speeches than philosophical writings.

By luck or fortune, it was not possible to fulfill the first, outside of which the second made no sense: and here is the book, a year later, in a modest edition, with my name on the cover and this preface in the first person.

It is still necessary to clarify that the purpose of this work is not to study Pielmeyer’s work per se, but only to take it as a starting point for certain reflections that concern contemporary religious consciousness. Its perspective, then, is not exactly that of a theatrical critic, but rather that of a scholar of religions. This will not prevent, however, that from my considerations a categorical judgment can be inferred regarding the value of the play, because, as high as my admiration for Benedetto Croce may be, I do not belong to the number of those who believe in a complete autonomy of the aesthetic, and I rather subscribe to Plato’s formula: beauty is the form of truth.

I must also inform that the actress Walderez de Barros – the remarkable Dr. Martha from the Teatro Paiol show – read this work and had the courage to not only agree with everything or almost everything, but also to be interested in a deeper understanding of the metaphysical issues mentioned in it, and to start studying them, although this assent and this study cost her the serious inner challenge of having to continue to play in the following months, without lowering her level, a character whose understanding could take a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. This rare example of psychological bravery deserves my sincerest homage.

São Paulo, September 1983.

1. The Plot

In the face of many works that present themselves today as Christian, there is reason for strong doubts regarding the meaning authors attribute to this word and even about the intention with which they employ it.

To be a Christian does not consist—and above all, is not limited—to merely participating in a certain diffuse sentimental atmosphere, feeling immersed in the “aura” of a Christian sensibility, nor even in sharing virtues or “values” admitted as Christian, such as charity, chastity, etc., etc. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, or atheists may appreciate these values and practice corresponding virtues, which are not specifically—much less exclusively—Christian. On the contrary, it is possible to be a Christian, and a sincere Christian, without possessing any exemplary virtues, as Christ did not come to seek the saints but the sinners.

What is not possible, what is absolutely impossible from all points of view, is to be a Christian without believing in the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, without believing that he was born of the Virgin Mary by the work of the Holy Spirit, that his suffering and death offer an opportunity for redemption to all men, that He rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and will return for the final judgment.

In short, being a Christian does not consist of generalities, but of firm adherence to a very particular and determined belief,84 precisely the one that the words of the Credo express without any ambiguity. Beyond this, the use of the term “Christian” is at best inaccurate or oblique.

What we have said does not necessarily imply that the Christian religion, specifically its Catholic and Latin form, is the only valuable spiritual manifestation or the only path to salvation. The mere existence of other world religions—and not to mention testimonies of authentic spiritual life within them—is a fact that no Christian can ignore. But just because two things are good does not mean they are the same. What child, hungry, would be satisfied with caresses, claiming that they are also good? Likewise, it would be ridiculous for someone to proclaim themselves a Christian for believing in things, albeit excellent things, such as Quranic virtues or the wisdom of Buddha. There are worlds and worlds of diverse spiritual riches: they do not answer the same questions or fulfill the same longings. However, the contemporary public seems to accept as Christian anything that emanates from “good feelings,” to the point of judging an atheist with sympathy as more Christian than a believer with ill humor. Who benefits from such gross confusion?

These distinctions may seem unnecessary, as they are too obvious, if not for the profusion of literary, theatrical, and cinematic works like the ones we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the most recent example being the play Agnes of God by John Pielmeyer, staged in 1982 at Teatro Paiol in São Paulo, directed by Jorge Takla, and featuring a memorable performance by Cleide Yáconis, Walderez de Barros, and Clarice Abujamra.

The plot revolves around a crime that is intended to appear as a miracle, or a miracle that hides under the appearances of a crime; and also a conversion that is nothing more than a nervous crisis, or a nervous crisis that ends up resulting in an authentic conversion. It is an enigma, and the final answer about what happened is left to the audience’s interpretation; the author himself is ambiguous and reticent, not hiding either his emotional sympathy or his intellectual aversion to the version according to which both the miracle and the conversion were authentic, at least in part. What is at stake, in the end, is the Christian faith against the cynicism, disbelief, and jadedness of modern rationalism; or, if one tends toward the opposite solution, it is the honesty and rigor of scientific conscience against the Christian demand that we believe in implausible things, particularly the virgin birth of Our Lady.

It is necessary to briefly summarize the plot so that what we are going to say later can be well understood.

A newborn baby is found dead in the garbage of a convent. The mother, Sister Agnes (Clarice Abujamra), claims to have suffered from amnesia and does not recognize the baby as her own. The criminal judge asks a psychiatrist, Dr. Martha (Walderez de Barros), for an evaluation of the mental sanity of the accused. If declared sane, Sister Agnes will be prosecuted (and, it is implied, convicted); if deemed ill, she will be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Asked about who could be the father of the child, the convent’s superior, Mother Miriam (Cleide Yáconis), after many circumlocutions, declares that she believes—or, more prudently, that she “does not entirely rule out the possibility”—that it is a miraculous virgin birth. A mature woman, a former mother, Mother Miriam is of solid bourgeois realism and knows that what she just said sounds like an enormous contradiction. But first, everything indicates to her that it is impossible for a man to have entered the convent; second, Sister Agnes is, to her, above any suspicion, because she is innocent to the point of bordering on mental weakness and has already shown herself to be a “special creature,” one for whom “God seems to have a special predilection.” Among other signs of this predilection, Mother Miriam highlights that Agnes, without any knowledge of music, has been singing wonderful chants “in a voice that is not hers”; and, even more significantly, her hands showed the stigmata of Christ one day, which then suddenly disappeared without leaving scars.85

As for the crime, Mother Miriam says that Agnes could only have committed it in a state of total unconsciousness, therefore without guilt.

The psychiatrist receives this version of the facts with ironic skepticism and insists on investigating to discover who the father of the child is. She does not hide her disgust for the Catholic Church, from which she claims to have distanced herself since childhood, revolted by the death of her sister, a novice, to whom the superiors had not promptly provided the medical care she needed. But she admits to sympathizing with Agnes and, considering that the circumstance of the crime having been committed in a psychotic trance could spare her from prison but not from the psychiatric hospital, she says she intends to investigate another hypothesis that, if confirmed, will prove the complete innocence of the accused: someone else, interested in covering up the scandal, would have entered the room and killed the child while the mother was sleeping.

Through hypnosis, Dr. Martha will attempt to make Agnes remember all the details to obtain, at the same time, psychological healing, proof of innocence, and a clue to the culprit. But in a hypnotic trance, Agnes reports that she was impregnated by none other than an angel and that the only human being who entered the room was her mother. If the first of these things is improbable, the second is impossible: Agnes’s mother has been dead for many years.

After many discussions with the psychiatrist about Catholicism versus scientific common sense, the Mother Superior ends up accepting that Agnes undergoes a new hypnosis session. In a trance, Agnes reveals that she was abused by her mother, an alcoholic, when she was a child. The wicked woman suffered from premonitory delusions in which she saw her daughter giving birth to an illegitimate child; and to prevent the risk, she inserted lit cigarettes into Agnes’s vagina.

Mother Miriam thinks that Agnes is suffering too much in the hypnosis sessions and asks the examining judge to have them stopped; but Dr. Martha appeals and obtains permission to continue. However, before a new session takes place, the doctor undergoes a violent personal transformation, under the accumulated impact of her experiences with Mother Miriam and Agnes: her menstruation, which had ceased three years before, suddenly returns during a night full of agitated dreams and frightening omens.

In the third session, Agnes, after recounting her direct encounter with God and Our Lady, suddenly confesses that she deliberately killed the child because she believed her pregnancy was “a mistake of God”; in tears, she affirms that she now hates God for it and is sure she is going to hell. She then implores the forgiveness of Our Lady, but “with the same words she used to implore her mother to stop abusing her” when she was a child. The scene of the confession depicts a delirium between hysterical and schizophrenic, which seems to suggest that the explanation for everything boils down to a banal psychiatric diagnosis. However, just when the audience is almost reassured by this return to materialistic common sense, something unexpected happens: Agnes’s hands start bleeding at the points of the stigmata of Christ.

Although the bleeding is later explained as mere hysterical somatization, the Mother Superior realizes, with horror, that Agnes was not the angelic creature she had imagined. But, agreeing with the diagnosis of homicidal insanity, she condemns the doctor for having destroyed “a hope that was very precious to her soul”; and after many ups and downs, she ends up thanking Dr. Martha for having freed her from an illusion. “We need people like you,” she says, recognizing that “good scientific common sense” can serve as an antidote to the excesses of faith.

Agnes is sent to the psychiatric hospital, and in the final scene, the doctor declares that she has not really reached any conclusion about the truth or falsehood of Agnes’s virgin birth, but that this ultimately does not matter; what matters is that Agnes’s tragic personal history deeply touched her, leading her to convert back to Catholicism. The fact that this astonishing sequence of events crossed the path of an agnostic and ended up leading her to conversion was miraculous enough in her eyes.

2. What it’s About

With some ellipses and abbreviations, this is the plot. It would all be just another vulgar tale of crime and madness if it weren’t interwoven with theological and moral discussions that highlight the significance of events. The characters end up becoming allegorical representations of the various options of contemporary consciousness regarding the religious problem, and the conflict ultimately takes on considerable scope and impact, for what is contested there is the soul of the viewer. The discussion about Agnes’s innocence or guilt, sanity or madness, is transformed into a dramatic decision – left to each individual’s conscience – about the possibility of miracles in general, specifically in the conditions of today’s world. This compels the viewer, in the final analysis, to take a stance on Christianity since all Christian dogma rests not only on one but on two miracles: the virgin birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead, not to mention the immaculate conception of Mary and the miracles performed by Jesus during his earthly life.

In an era that tends to dissolve the religious question into vague considerations about morality and human rights, Pielmeyer’s play has the merit of presenting the problem in real terms: if we don’t believe in miracles, we simply are not Christians, no matter how much our ideals or feelings coincide with certain peripheral emanations of Christian sentimentality; if we believe that miracles did happen, but in a past time vaguely mythical, having nothing to do with what we consider the “reality” of life today, then we are also not Christians: we may wish to be, but only in fantasy.

The reason we decided to write about this is that the question seems particularly serious to us, not because we have any special aptitude or taste for theater criticism.

3. The Structure of the Play

Right from the beginning of the play, Pielmeyer structures the conflict in a didactic manner, following the trinary scheme of medieval autos, in which an angel and a demon compete for the possession of a soul. The soul is that of Mother Miriam, the angel is Agnes, and the demon is the tempting psychiatrist who ultimately manages to destroy Mother Miriam’s faith and the angelic innocence of Agnes – representing, in the context of the scene, at least a partial victory for the devil’s party.

As in the medieval autos, such as the Auto da Alma by Gil Vicente, which, although belonging chronologically to a somewhat later period, follows the scheme of medieval theater, each of the extreme characters represents a univocal, coherent force, in radical and irreconcilable opposition to an adversarial force of equivalent power (Agnes, faith; Dr. Martha, denial), while the soul, inherently doubtful and wavering, oscillates between the two poles. In fact, Mother Miriam is good and dedicated, but her faith is more a “desire to believe,” as William James would say, than an inner certainty. Wishing to believe in Agnes’s innocence but simultaneously doubting that miracles can happen “nowadays,” she asks God not to take away this “last illusion” she needs to live and believe. The words of her prayer are self-contradictory: to ask God to deceive us is already to confuse God and the devil. As a representative of Christian consciousness, Mother Miriam is inherently inept: the content of her belief is pure atheism and blasphemy, but she imagines herself Christian because she is immersed in vulgar sentimentalism, which is like a secretion of the religious environment.

This sentimentalism – which many today, both Catholics and atheists, mistake for true faith simply because, like Mother Miriam, they have never known anything better – is fertile ground for the seeds of rationalistic negativism. What can sentimental aspirations do against the convincing force of the “truth of facts”?86 The rationalistic onslaught will precisely attack this weak point, making the poor soul, who imagines herself religious, struggle between a law that commands her to love the truth and the impossibility of honestly denying proven facts that contradict the foundations of that same law.

How many consciences have shattered in the last hundred years seeking a possible reconciliation between a religious concept of morality and a secular and “scientific” concept of intellectual honesty? Why should the duty to “renounce this world” apply unilaterally to the domain of morality, feelings, and actions, while human intelligence, which is precisely the “better part” (Lk 10:42), is entirely enslaved to the supposed “concrete facts,” out of fear of a science that declares itself frankly “of this world” by its very methodological constitution? Are not the fantasies of Teilhard de Chardin, for example, the typical result of this mixture of incompatible elements?

Mother Miriam, in fact, having staked her life on the religion of miracles, never saw any miracles. If she were to see just one, her entire choice would be confirmed, her life justified, her doubts appeased. Suddenly, someone with the stigmata of Christ appears to her. Wasn’t this the illusion she asked for? However, by desiring to see a miracle, had Mother Miriam not implicitly subjected her faith to the “scientific” criterion of the “concrete fact”? Well, now she will have to accept, willingly or forcefully, another “concrete fact” that the psychiatrist will throw in her face: “the stigmata” can well have a simple psychic cause, nothing miraculous. They could be a somatization of hysterical conflicts.

Considering Agnes’s pregnancy, the murder of the baby, and the traumatic antecedents reported under hypnosis, this explanation is quite reasonable, and Mother Miriam sees the miracle slip through her fingers by the same route it entered: through a reverential, idolatrous, and unintelligent fear of “concrete facts” – a mechanical compensation for the desire to deceive oneself. Isn’t it enough to drive a Christian mad? “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign” (Mt 12:39).

But returning to the structure of the play, in the medieval autos, as in the present case, the trinary of characters evolves into a quaternary, as the soul is bifurcated by the play of opposing influences. The situation acquires a contour that can be schematized in a cross diagram:

For there to be a conflict, both powers must have equal persuasive force, and the soul must be divided between contradictory appeals supported by equally weighty evidence: the evidence of the “higher destiny” that she finds within herself (the angel), and the evidence of her own tendency to dispersion and deviation in the “concrete facts” of external reality (the demon). Thus, a dynamic is formed that leads the soul into an endless succession of ascents and falls, which can be represented by a quaternary rhythm of rotation of the arms of the cross in our diagram:

This cross structure is by no means a coincidence in medieval autos because, being a traditional and sacred form of art, adherence to the rules of religious symbolism, both in the outward composition of the characters and in the internal structure of the work itself, is not only intentional but obligatory. Nor is it coincidental that the quaternary rhythm resembles that of the four phases of the Moon, which, according to a well-known traditional symbolism for those who have taken the trouble to study it, precisely represents the human mind, the field of cyclical transformations and interchanges between conflicting polarities that mirror and repel each other incessantly. Moreover, our word “mind” comes from (through Latin mens) precisely the Greek menás, menas, which means nothing else but “Moon” – from which many other terms also derived, such as ményma, menuma, which have meanings like “signify,” “represent,” “symbolize,” etc., defining precisely the functions of the psyche.

The same conception of endless rotation between four directions is that of the “wheel of life,” the wheel of fortune, rota fortunæ, often sculpted on the portals of Gothic cathedrals as a symbol of the psychic world (see figure below), with its ups and downs that believers could escape only through access to a spiritual or suprapsychic dimension that would free them from the play of contrary tendencies for the contemplation of celestial immutability, eternal peace. Indeed, this is why the celestial state is represented as a state of “rest,” in contrast to the pains and labors of the earthly condition.

The access to the immutable is symbolized by the center of the wheel, by the axis that governs and determines movements without directly participating in them or being affected by them. Now, when crossing the portal to enter the Church, the believer symbolically performed this passage through the middle of the wheel (see figure below), escaping the circular movement by passing from the “outside” and the profane world (the square, the street) to the “inside” and the sacred (the nave of the temple). The word templo (temple) significantly derives from a Hebrew root meaning “cut” or “rupture”; a root that can also be found in the Arabic verb támana, “to separate,” and in our word “tamanho” (size).87

When, in Christian symbolism, the Virgin Mary is represented with her feet on the Moon, this precisely indicates the immeasurable difference between the axis and the wheel, the radical distinction of planes between the psychic and the spiritual, and the absolute dominion of the latter over the former, whether it be human psyche or the “cosmic” psyche, which nowadays is often confused with the spiritual proper.

4. Transfiguration of the Conflict

In medieval plays, the liberating transition from one plane to another is represented by the interference of some superior character, someone who came from heaven, signifying a region beyond the psyche. This character, usually represented by Our Lady, by Jesus, by a group of saints or, as in Auto da alma, by the Church, will snatch the soul out of the psychic, mental plane where the conflict has unfolded up to this point, and, by elevating it to purely spiritual contemplation, will make it comprehend the totality of the cosmological scheme that constituted the frame and conditioning of its individual drama. The soul then understands the extent of its existential misery and, simultaneously, its essential greatness, thus obtaining full knowledge of the truth that frees it.

In the symbolism of spatial directions, the “wheel” is represented horizontally, an immediate reference to the horizon, that is, the circumference of the sensible world that extends around us; and the axis is vertical, as it is then the “axis of the worlds,” interlinking the various planes of existence, from hell to heaven, passing through the intermediate plane where we are. This is the figure of the three-dimensional cross:

The Christian Chrisma has an evident relationship with this figure, for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, being the radiating center of all reality, could not fail to be represented at the center of the directions of space, as can be seen in the famous inscription at the Saint-Denis d’Orques monastery, collected by historian Louis Charbonneau-Lassay, which gives us today a glimpse of the time when Christians, not yet contaminated by the demon of “demythologization,” knew how to see in symbols something more than simple allegory:

The fact that the angel and the demon do not belong to the same plane, being instead personifications of opposite tendencies, one ascending and the other descending, is represented in astronomical and astrological symbolism by the tilt of the ecliptic (apparent orbit of the Sun, which symbolizes the world of changes, of cycles), in relation to the axis of the poles, forming a figure like this:

This figure is more appropriate than the previous one to represent the conflict in question because it includes, besides the static “high” and “low,” the idea of a “relative rise” (in the C-E-D direction), followed by a “relative fall” (in the D-F-C direction), which well expresses the movements of the soul between mystical exaltation and despair. A fortunate exemplification of the objective character of traditional symbols, which distinguishes them from all allegorism, is the fact that the tilt of the ecliptic in relation to the celestial equator is equal to the tilt of the heart in relation to the vertical of the human body.

As we said, “salvation from above” is represented by some celestial character, and, in the case of Auto da alma, by the Church. Now, it is interesting to observe that the word “church” comes (through the Latin ecclesia) from the Greek ekklesía, which means “assembly,” but has the same root as the verb ekkleío, which means “to interdict,” “to separate,” “to exclude,” and also from ekkláo, which means “to separate by breaking.” These words have the same sense of separation and rupture – between two worlds, the profane and the sacred, the horizontal and the vertical – that we had observed in the etymology of the word “temple”; so that, through two semantic evolutions, one from Hebrew, the other from Greek, we arrive at the same symbolism, which is that of the angle that separates the horizontal from the vertical, the liberating passage from one level to another, a passage for which, and for whose realization, all the temples of the Earth were built.

It is relevant to consider the common etymology of the words “angel” (ángelos) and “angle,” marking with a symbolism of singular eloquence the discontinuity between the psychic and the spiritual and the need for a superior influence – God’s command to the angel, the message of which the angel is the messenger – for the soul to make the passage, the leap between levels.

As can be seen by comparing the architecture of temples and the structure of medieval plays, the latter were, as much as the construction of churches, a form of perfectly sacred and ritual art, founded on a symbolism that excluded all wandering of subjective sentimentality and required, on the contrary, perfect fidelity to doctrine. If such spectacles had any effect on the audience, this effect should not be confused with that of a merely propagandistic “catechesis,” but emanated, on the contrary, from a legitimate spiritual influence that could only be conveyed by a “technically” rigorous symbolism.88 This gives all forms of traditional art an objective spiritual value, which modernity has lost in favor of the expression of subjective emotions. This was summarized in the motto of the trade corporations: Ars sine scientia nihil, “art without science is nothing.”

From this profound truth emanates, through the apparent simplicity of forms, the miraculous “light from elsewhere,” allótrium fós, the transfiguring halo around certain works of traditional art, like the icons of the Russian Church. How far we are from modern sentimentalism, not to mention merely commercial spectacles, which court the most banal emotions of the viewer to obtain a superficial and momentary adherence, even if at the price of committing the greatest nonsense, which certainly do not contribute to a greater understanding of doctrine nor to the deepening of faith…

5. Mysticism and Dementia

If Pielmeyer’s play coincides with medieval autos in both its declared objectives – to arouse, if not conversions, at least an initial awakening of religious consciousness – as well as in the triad of characters, it diverges from them in the resolution it gives to the conflict. As in all drama, it is the outcome that gives the ultimate meaning of events, a different outcome can lead to the production of different effects in the consciousness of the viewer. If for a millennium, the medieval theatre, with its apparently naive simplicity, but based on symbolism of great metaphysical reach, managed to achieve conversions throughout Europe and constantly rekindle the fervor of believers, let’s see what Pielmeyer achieves with the supposedly more sophisticated resources at his disposal.

Firstly, the transition from the psychic level to the spiritual level is absent. The drama unfolds on the plane of individual psychism and remains there until the end. All interferences from a higher instance, which could free from the psychic game of contradictions and at least suggest a direct intellection of the truth, are, on the contrary, seen on the scale of Agnes' individual psyche, and therefore relativized. As mere psychic phenomena, without explicit spiritual or metaphysical reach, it is impossible to distinguish in them a “vision” from a “hallucination”, and in fact we do not know if Agnes saw Our Lady, as the perfectly healthy children of Fatima and Medjugorje saw her, or if she entered a psychotic outbreak, imagining to see her. Moreover, the confusion between these two things is only possible in the modern world, because a millennium ago a show like Agnes' would, from the outset, and without any hesitation, be catalogued as demonic possession or at least as suspicious eccentricity. Visions were, then, much more frequent, and so it was natural that people in general – and not necessarily only those versed in theology – knew how to distinguish the false from the true.

For two millennia, the Catholic Church taught its priests, and these to the faithful, the science of discernment of spirits, that is, the recognition of the sources – divine, angelic, demonic, psychic – of the inspirations received, and until about thirty years ago this was still a curricular subject in all seminaries, as a topic of Mystical Theology. I do not know if the subject was removed from the curriculum or if there are no longer qualified teachers, but when the cream of Catholic intellectuality begins to confuse divine apparitions, demonic possessions and schizophrenic outbreaks, then certainly discernment is on the decline.

Now, this phenomenon is truly stupefying, in the eyes of those who believe in the progress of human consciousness throughout history. In the Middle Ages or even three hundred or two hundred years ago, a case like Agnes' would not raise doubts, and even less could it trigger conscience dramas about the authenticity or falsity of this or that miracle, let alone miracles in general, not to mention religion as a whole. From the perspective of traditional Catholicism, the plot of Pielmeyer’s play would seem like a tempest in a teacup.

More precisely, a supposed saint who claimed beatific visions and who suddenly, in an unconscious outbreak, strangled his own child, would be considered a victim of the devil, that is, someone who failed in a battle in which victory, precisely, would be the only valid criterion of sanctity. Nobody, from the judges of the Inquisition to the humblest illiterate peasant – let alone a scholar, a writer! – would imagine he was a saint. Indeed, saints can sin, doubt, deny, blaspheme, even kill – but they cannot have schizophrenic splits, since the integrity of personal consciousness is a conditio sine qua non of repentance, without which there is no sanctity, nor faith, nor conversion.

Such crises, if they occurred, would not only snatch them out of the sphere of superior spiritual influence, but also, obviously, out of the scope of simple human intercommunication. The victim of these states would not only be out of the race for sainthood, but would not even participate in religion in the most external and social sense of the term, because, in all religions of the world, the mad have no ritual or moral obligation of any kind. In the Middle Ages, Agnes could be burned as a witch, thrown into a prison as a criminal, or simply left on the streets at the mercy of public charity, as was usually done with the mad; but she would not trigger any theological discussion whatsoever.

Mr. Pielmeyer, however, intends that Sister Agnes' crime has a profound significance for contemporary religious consciousness; that it can shake both our faith (as it did with Mother Miriam) and our rationalism (to the point of converting Dr. Martha). Is this not an alarming sign of how far contemporary intellectuality has lost all criterion of distinction between psychic phenomena, not to mention psychopathic ones, and authentic hierophanies – a criterion that was as obvious and public a millennium ago as it is today, for example, in many indigenous tribes? And wouldn’t those who suffer from this loss be subjecting themselves to terrible conscience dramas because of a simple confusion of planes of reality? Moreover, to what extent is contemporary psychology – with the complicity of the religious who think they should submit the truths of faith to a supposedly “scientific” judgment – directly responsible for this confusion?89

6. Symbolism and Verisimilitude

The structure of the play will respond. If, after assembling the conflict, Pielmeyer does not solve it through a transfiguring appearance that elevates the drama to the plane of universality, as occurs in medieval theater and as was done among us in the marvelous “autos” by Ariano Suassuna, what resolution does he provide then?

Here is where the most astonishing thing happens, for if the play, in its initial structure, is shaped by medieval ternary, in the composition of the characters individually considered, it draws inspiration from the line of psychological realism – from Chekhov to Albee – which emphasizes the internal contradictions of each one’s soul, avoiding all schematism in favor of verisimilitude, but thereby eliminating any possibility of symbolic transfiguration and, consequently, of a metaphysically meaningful solution.

The symbolic truth, the only one accessible to art, tends necessarily towards typology, towards universal models that typify permanent human possibilities or cosmogonic forces; hence, it is limited in its potential for verisimilitude. First, verisimilitude is merely a psychological effect of a hypnotic type, relinquishing spiritual depth in exchange for a simple emotional impact; second, the demand for psychological verisimilitude according to the standard of bourgeois everyday life is an expression of a transient and historically determined social context; it depends on what the viewer considers plausible and therefore requires a “leveling down” due to the most vulgar experiences and emotions of a particular historical time unless one wishes to be plausible only for a few; third: it is inherently false because it cannot encompass the higher aspects of reality, which could not be plausible to those who are unaware of them.

Verisimilitude, specifically that of realistic theater, can therefore only convey a provincial and partial view of things. In fact, the higher and more universal a truth is, the more it escapes banal experience and the more it needs the intermediation of symbols to be transmitted. Hence, even authors expressly faithful to the canons of realism have to abandon them all the time, as Balzac, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Perez Galdos, or Pio Baroja do, for example, in order to give the necessary metaphysical depth to characters and situations.

Just as with certain intentionally “unrealistic” scenes in the works of these authors, the “descent” of spiritual influence in medieval autos is symbolic, and only for this reason does it allow the transition from the psychological to the metaphysical plane. By choosing to remain in the realm of “concrete facts,” Pielmeyer limited the scope of his play to the psychological sphere. But if the question discussed there consists of ascertaining the authenticity of a miracle, and if this authenticity precisely consists in it not being purely subjective, corresponding to an objective spiritual reality, how could this question be seriously posed without leaving the realm of individual psyche, that is, without breaking with a psychological “realism” that perceives nothing beyond subjective immanence?

By opting for strict psychological verisimilitude, according to the standards of modern bourgeois audience, the author artificially created a dead-end dilemma, a rigged game of cards; a senseless game reminiscent, not coincidentally, of the artificial sufferings imposed upon himself by a hysterical patient; a pretense that genuinely hurts and suddenly ends, a gloomy nightmare that dissipates with tragicomic ease.

7. Filling the Gap

In the cross-shaped scheme with which we characterize the structure of medieval autos, the interference of the “vertical” had the effect of subtracting the soul from the endless play of opposing forces (the rotation of the quaternary) and returning it to a “center” where, after a symbolic “descent” into the infernos (recapitulation of the lower possibilities, which were thus “saved” or transfigured through repentance and conversion), the soul rises to the heavens. Moreover, in this scheme, the soul repeats the path of Christ, and this journey ceases to be just a historical event, dated (sub Pontio Pilato), to be transfigured into a supratemporal paradigm (in illo tempore), to be universally repeated as the path of salvation, the “way of the cross.”

The celestial influence, therefore, unifies the various opposing forces at the unique point of coincidentia oppositorum, which is symbolically represented by the center of the cross, by the center of the wheel, where all the rays meet. This reunification is the very goal of religion, as seen in the well-known etymology of re-ligare.

But, starting from the ternary, passing through the quaternary and ignoring the unifying superior influence, what way is left for the author of the play? The opposite way: multiplication. Thus, consistent with his demand for verisimilitude, which detests schematism and requires internal contradictions, he duplicates the individualities of the characters, bringing forth behind each one their double, their respective “shadow,” which at first goes unnoticed in the ternary disposition of roles: Mother Miriam, an austere nun, will reveal herself as a desperate skeptic who could only be confirmed in faith by a miracle and who, in the absence of an authentic miracle, does not hesitate to cling to a sham; Dr. Martha, the rationalist skeptic, will emerge as the latent Christian, who was only waiting for any stimulus to return to the arms of the Church. Agnes, in turn, is successively multiplied by two, four, and six. To her angelic-criminal contradiction, the pairs “insanity and sanity,” “premeditation and unconsciousness,” “sincerity and pretense” are added.

As the changes in each character reflect in the structure of the others, multiply the aspects of Agnes by the contradictions of Mother Miriam and Dr. Martha, and you will get an astonishing figure. This figure shows the number of angles that the question takes on in the viewer’s consciousness; it reveals the “secret” of the dramatic effect that Pielmeyer is building, consisting of assembling the seemingly simple initial data into an increasingly insoluble puzzle; he complicates, complicates, closes all exits, in order to trap the spectator in an atmosphere increasingly oppressive and depressing.

However, as the initial dilemma is purely artificial, this development, though technically interesting, has no greater spiritual meaning, reflecting, on the contrary, only a progressive obscuring of understanding, which indeed seems to be the aim of the spectacle: it flattens, confuses, compresses everything downwards, until, in the state of confusion to which the viewer is reduced – and which the author seems to offer as synonymous with a deeper understanding of things -, there seems to be no difference anymore between crime and miracle, insanity and sanctity, hell and heaven, monstrosity and beauty.90 If it is this kind of religion that Dr. Martha converts to, we can only conclude that she has gone mad.

To understand the ultimate meaning of this infernal device conceived by Pielmeyer, soi disant for the diffusion of faith, it is enough to remember Jesus' words: “Whoever is not with me scatters.” And if the inspiration of the play, after this, still leaves room for doubt, we can offer, regarding Dr. Martha’s conversion and the cachectic objectives of the play, the lapidary definition of Simone Weil: “To be in hell is to mistakenly believe that one is in heaven”.91

Curiously, the Prince of this world, whose participation in the weaving of such grotesque events must not have been minor, is not even once mentioned throughout the extent of the dialogues. Why, if the most natural and obvious hypothesis in the face of the absurd and the inhuman would precisely be that of a satanic interference? This character, precisely because it has been omitted, exerts such a profound effect on the ultimate result of the show, that to define it the best thing is to remember the quip of the late Stanislaw Ponte Preta: “His absence filled a gap”.

8. Truth and “Fact”

But the issue does not end there. On the contrary, it barely begins, because Agnes can serve as a starting point for an examination of the fantasies and misconceptions that some schools of contemporary psychology have been disseminating about spiritual and religious issues, and about Christianity in particular. If on the one hand this applies to all the most notorious currents of psychology, on the other hand, this influence has penetrated so deeply into religious circles that almost no one within them realizes how hostile it is to everything essential in religion. On the contrary, everyone seems eager to submit to the emanations of what they mistakenly see as a beneficial and revivifying influx of modern thought on traditional religion.

The piece we are examining is an example of this intimate corruption, of this cowardice in the face of the rise of the supposedly scientific power of agnostic intellectuality, of this intellectual disintegration that makes a Catholic elevate a profane criterion of “intellectual honesty” – understood as methodical agnosticism, or, what amounts to the same thing, methodical incomprehension – to the status of a universally valid criterion for judging the sacred. For it is only in this atmosphere that the disastrous misconceptions that Pielmeyer commits in Agnes could germinate, turning this play into a compendium of the delusions of contemporary Catholic consciousness.

The play presents itself as a discussion of the Christian religion based on a fact. Religion will be acquitted or condemned according to the conclusions of an investigation into the scope and meaning of the fact. In reality, what ends up being questioned is not just Christianity, in what it has that is specific and different from other religions, but rather religion in general, since, on the one hand, no other religion is mentioned, and, on the other hand, for the vast majority, Christianity, being the only religious form they know, identifies with religion tout-court.

But this questioning reveals all its artificiality in the eyes of any informed viewer that the concept of “miracle”, in the common sense of the term, is specifically Christian and Western, and that virtually all other religions and traditions of the world have always lived perfectly well without feeling the slightest need to attest, through historical investigation, the true or false character of any miraculous facts; and, even within Christianity, “historicity”, despite all the efforts of the “new theology” to transform it into something essential and congenial to faith itself, never had this role before the 19th century. And it couldn’t be otherwise, since it was only then that modern methods of historical investigation and document attestation were put into systematic use. Thus, if historical certainty were so essential to faith, and if the miraculous, by its very nature, did not infinitely transcend the concepts of “positive fact” and “historicity”, all previous Christianity would be suspect.

In any case, to a Taoist or Hindu, the idea that the case of Sister Agnes could serve as support or refutation of their doctrines would seem, at the very least, bizarre. And the concept of religion, of divinity, of the supernatural, owing nothing to the historical-positive idea of “fact”, cannot be seriously discussed based on the simple truth or falsehood of an event, miraculous or not.

9. Revelation and Miracle

This seems to contradict what we said pages ago: that it is impossible to be a Christian without believing in the miracle of the virginal birth and the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the initial Miracle that establishes a religion and the many miracles that thereafter attest to the continuity of the same spiritual influence that produced it.

In the first case, it is obviously something that infinitely transcends the field of empirical facts and escapes historical investigation, for no human documentary attestation could prove the divine origin of this initial Revelation. It is this Revelation, on the contrary, that establishes a field of doctrinal and symbolic criteria by which the orthodoxy of all subsequent miracles will be judged; and this criterion of orthodoxy has primacy over the criterion of factual truth, for historical investigation will not even be considered if the fact in question does not fit, in the eyes of the Roman Curia, into the patterns of Christian symbolism and orthodoxy.

For example, any astonishing effect that can be achieved through magic procedures, by the mere fact of having occurred and having been historically and documentarily attested, will not be classified as miraculous, because it is not orthodox, it is not doctrinally valid and does not coincide with the symbolism of the initial Revelation.

The historical investigation of facts claiming to be miraculous thus presupposes a criterion of “miraculousness” that is prior to and independent of the truth of the subsequent facts it will judge. Documentary or scientific attestation of factual truth will only have value if the facts, besides being real, coincide with this criterion.

This means, on the one hand, that the number of “real” miracles that come to be attested does not alter the essential value of the initial Revelation; in principle, we could even – to reason according to the most extreme case – doubt all the miracles performed by all the saints, without thereby ceasing to be Christians, at least essentially, as is proved by the fact that Protestants, whom no one denies to be Christians, do not admit the worship of saints or the infallible – and therefore miraculous – character of papal teaching. And, in this last example, they agree with the Orthodox, who also do not cease to be Christians for this reason.

On the other hand, only a positivist postulate – and therefore anti-spiritual by definition – could imagine the hypothesis of judging the truth of religion by the historical accuracy of “facts”. For the religious person, the facts, whatever they may be, and however many there are, are nothing more than contingent manifestations of the possibilities contained in Divine Intelligence; this is what guarantees the veracity of the facts, and it does not need to be guaranteed by them. Facts have value only as manifestations or even symbols of certain eternal and “non-factual” realities.92 Moreover, the concept of “fact” implies a frame of reference given by certain conditions of time and space that define precisely, this our world; if we were to subject faith to the examination of facts, how could we believe in the account of Genesis and the Final Judgment, which necessarily occur “before” and “after” the period of existence of a world marked by these conditions? And how could we believe in the Paradise of bliss, in the angelic worlds that necessarily overlap the conditions of temporality and spatiality that define this world?

For the religious person, the foundation of truth does not reside in the realm of facts, but in the hierophanic nature of consciousness. But understanding this requires a state in which consciousness understands itself as light, as a reflection of Divine Intelligence itself.93 Whoever has realized this does not need more “proofs”, because they have reached, at least partially and momentarily, a condition of “pure objectivity”; and for those who have not realized this, the other proofs serve no purpose, because what is the use of the awareness of this or that particular fact to an intelligence that has not become aware of itself? An Islamic proverb says that a donkey loaded with books is not the same as a wise man; miraculous facts in abundance mean nothing to the man who has not realized the miracle of miracles, which is the birth in us of the light of Intelligence. Moreover, all external miracles only have value when, through their symbolism, they create a plane of reflection in which the soul can appreciate this eternal birth of the Divine Word in us.

Now, not all facts considered miraculous allow this symbolic transposition, and therefore not all astounding events are miracles. For this very reason, the pregnancy of Mother Agnes, as astounding as it may be, would never be a miracle, and even less a proof of the truth of the Catholic religion, even if it had occurred as Mother Superior imagines it. The monstrous, the horrendous, cannot in any case be symbolically transposed to a divine plane, except as properly “satanic” inversions. Of course, it may happen, occasionally, that an individual is converted to religion by the effect of confrontation with brutality, horror, and absurdity, as was indeed the case with Dr. Martha, and any conversion can be considered miraculous from some point of view. But would it be a real conversion if confusion continued to exist between the divine and the monstrous? What kind of Christianity is this, that confuses God and the devil?

As for virgin births, doesn’t the Celtic-Christian legend of the Holy Grail tell of the virgin birth of the Magician Merlin as Satan’s work? Of course, theologically, an act of the devil could not occur without divine permission, but this would not give it a divine character in itself, unless we wish to deliberately confuse everything.

10. Natural and Supernatural (1)

In summary, if Christianity strictly depends on the miracle that inaugurates it, this, by definition, is independent of any subsequent miracles, to which, on the contrary, it confers, by the paradigmatic character of its symbolism, every criterion of legitimacy. Such miracles will be authentic or not in as far as, once their factual truth is established, this reflects, with greater or lesser fidelity, the symbolism of birth, death, and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. An examination of this question from the metaphysical point of view will definitively show the kind of misinterpretation the play induces in the religious consciousness of the spectator.

The miraculous is, by definition, a “descent” of purely spiritual realities and their entry into a lower and natural plane; the difference between these two planes is that the natural is more formal, and therefore, more limited and limiting than the supernatural, just as the real is, by definition, more restrictive and limiting than the possible; the real, by definition, is possible, but not all possible is (or already is) realized; the real is, so to speak, a crystallization in the waters of possibility; it is coagulated possibility and therefore, unrepeatable.94

If we call “nature” (narrowing, by the way, quite a bit, the sense of the word in Greek and Latin) the totality of possibilities that coagulate into forms of body, energy, mass, and movement, we then say that the supernatural is the field of possibilities that surpasses the set of these forms; but since, forcibly, what surpasses encompasses, there is nothing in nature that is not “contained” in the supernatural. Therefore, nothing can be natural without being supernatural, because the former is nothing more than a form or aspect of the latter – in scholastic language, nature is an attribute or accident of a supernatural essence.

Hence, (even without taking into account that current science does not encompass the totality of nature, but only some of its aspects) there can be no natural law that sets limits to the supernatural; on the contrary, the very limits of nature are supernatural determinations, as can be seen by the evidence that the external limit of an entity could not be contained within itself. Therefore, the miracle cannot be defined as a “breaking of the limits of natural laws,” since such limits are themselves of a supernatural, and therefore miraculous, order.

If it is objected that this definition is provisional and refers only to the limits known by modern science, the obvious response is that modern science, admittedly, does not know where these limits are, and that, furthermore, there would not even be a condition to set limits to the orb encompassed by science itself, given the unmanageable volume of research and scientific publications, as well as the new theories that daily correct or invalidate yesterday’s theories, so that science could not even give a simple nominal and conventional definition of the miracle, saying that it is everything beyond its knowledge. Furthermore, miracles were reported long before modern science existed, and therefore defining them in relation to it makes no sense.

To complete, everyone knows that any scientific knowledge is impossible without metaphysical presuppositions, that is, without some conviction about the limits of nature (and therefore about the “supernatural”); conversely, knowledge of the supernatural does not depend on any “scientific” investigation.

11. Natural and Supernatural (2)

Not only do the boundaries of the natural belong to the realm of the supernatural, but it would also be inconceivable for “nature” to exist once established and fixed within its limits, without being periodically sustained and replenished by the supernatural source. Any reality that, once determined, could never again expand the given possibilities from the beginning and had to limit itself to “spending” what has already been received would be condemned to decline and death. It would be like an organism that, unable to feed on any external source, had to consume itself to continue existing. And all existence would be a continuous fall with no possible reversal.

This is the theory of the otiosus God, a God who, after creating the world, never interferes again, letting it roll towards nothingness. This theory was in vogue shortly after the Renaissance when the newly born modern science imagined it had discovered the “eternal laws” that govern nature, and according to which it could continue to exist indefinitely without any further external influence.

However, subsequent observations revealed that novelties exist in the cosmos, meaning unexpected and unpredictable events occur, both on a microscopic and macroscopic scale, such as electron displacements in orbits or the appearance of new stars. Furthermore, it was not necessary to rely on these observations alone: the idea that something could be both defined (i.e., finite) and eternal was itself inconceivable. If the Universe had limits, at least logical ones, there had to be something beyond its borders, and this something would precisely be, once again, the “supernatural.”

The two opposing tendencies – continuous exhaustion of initial possibilities and continuous replenishment with new possibilities – have received, in our time, the respective names of entropy and negentropy (we use these words only because they are known and allow for a brief explanation, not because we particularly appreciate them).

The impossibility of conceiving an irreversible and uncompensated entropy shows that nature, defined as a field of possibilities, would be simply unviable if this field were not continuously replenished and expanded. Not only can “nature” define the boundaries of what lies beyond it, but its own boundaries continually expand within this beyond, and through it, to compensate for the depletion of natural possibilities that, once realized and no longer repeatable, broaden the realm of the impossible.

Regrettably, modern science, after arriving at such undoubtedly correct conclusions, failed to ascend to a metaphysical and purely spiritual conception and insists on providing “natural” and even “corporal” representations of this supra-cosmic instance. “Black holes” are the inverted and caricatured image of the dark night spoken of by mystics as a bridge to the spiritual world. Mystics knew that this portal could only be crossed spiritually, yet modern science seems to want to physically transcend beyond the physical world.

This “corporalization” of metaphysical concepts is one of the most “sinister” traits of the West’s dizzying intellectual decline in recent centuries. In this regard, academic science is no different from occultism and pseudo-spiritualism, which “corporalize” entities of the spiritual world, clothing them in “fluids,” “energies,” “magnetic vibrations,” “ectoplasms,” and so on.

In summary, the existence of “nature” would be impossible without a “supernatural” that establishes and replenishes it, just as the real would be impossible if it were not continuously made possible… by the possible! Here, we need to ascend to the notion of Universal Possibility, of Omnipossibility or Omnipotence, which infinitely transcends the idea of “cosmic laws” that delimit the boundaries of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought.

In light of this notion, we see that the “miracle” as the “descent” of the supernatural into the natural realm – and thus as a sudden expansion of possibilities previously defined therein – is not only possible but logically and metaphysically necessary. It would be inconceivable that, with nature existing, there would not be constant miracles to sustain it. Moreover, it would be at least unlikely that some of these miracles would not be witnessed by some of the trillions of human beings populating this part of the universe.

For this reason, the acceptance of the supernatural and its presence has always been an unquestionable certainty for the common sense of all ages, besides being a doctrine formally upheld by all religions and traditions worldwide. Only our era has defined the miracle as something that contradicts and goes against common sense. In such a time, it becomes difficult to recognize the need for miracles and the miracles happening around us. To compensate for the enormous melancholic depression and despair caused by this “disenchantment” – which many theologians, or so-called ones, consider particularly promising – the hysterical pursuit of the “extraordinary” ends up leading to a hunger for the absurd and the monstrous, confused with the sublime and the miraculous. Let’s examine this aspect of contemporary psychology more closely, of which John Pielmeyer’s play is such a significant example.

12. Heaven and Hell

Supernatural is commonly defined in relation to or in opposition to the natural; however, this definition implies the existence of a parallelism between these two orders, so that each attribute present in one is absent (or inversely present) in the other, and vice versa. This is only possible if both belong to the same plane of reality or, in logical terms, if they are species of the same genus.

In truth, the term “supernatural,” as its composition indicates, designates that which transcends nature. By definition, as we have seen, what transcends encompasses, contains, and includes, and therefore cannot be limited to the same plane as that which it encompasses, much less have any sort of biunivocal parallelism with it.

It is truly humiliating to have to insist on such obvious explanations, but this error, precisely because it is so elementary, is committed with frightening frequency, both by malevolent minds and by naive “intellectuals” suffering from logical asthenia. The effects of this error on public opinion are fearsome. If, according to the “common sense” fostered by the pseudoscience governing contemporary ideologies, we conceive nature, the sensible world, as the only given and unquestionable reality, based on which, and only on which, everything else must be reduced and abstracted as a hypothesis, then we can only conceive the supernatural in that manner, that is, in opposition to the natural.

But what happens then? The said parallelism, being, as we explained, a pure and simple contradiction, cannot correspond to anything real. What it defines is an impossibility: that a being is simultaneously equal and greater than another. No matter how much we seek this supernatural, we will not find it. Nevertheless, people, driven by both their essential human tendency and, even more so, by the desire to escape the disenchantment and depression fostered by this same science, feel the need to seek some supernatural – and as they do not know of any other, as scientific authority does not inform them of the existence of any other, they seek this one. They seek the impossible. And since, evidently, they do not find it, nothing is left for them but to give up and fall back into disenchantment (like Dr. Martha), or else project onto the interstices of nature what the said definition of the supernatural allows them to conceive and imagine (like Mother Miriam). What this definition allows them to conceive and imagine, being simultaneously parallel and inverse to nature, is simply the antinatural. The monstrous, the aberrant, and the abnormal are thus confused with the miraculous. And Mother Agnes is canonized for strangling her baby.

Thus, the terminological confusion fostered by contemporary pseudo-intellectualism takes advantage of the legitimate longing of the popular masses for the divine and the miraculous, in order to throw them into the most tragic of errors. The “extraterrestrials” elevated to the status of angels (and, conversely, angels reduced to the rank of UFO pilots and intergalactic orderlies), the mediums passing for saints and initiates, the psychic influence games masquerading as high spiritual gifts – all serve to demonstrate what we say and to prove that René Guénon did not exaggerate in pointing out the anti-intellectual, obfuscating, and “satanic” character of many contemporary scientific ideologies.

We could continue almost indefinitely with these clarifications, as the number of misunderstandings on such matters shows no sign of stopping growing. However, to conclude these considerations, let us emphasize one last point related to the previous one: the symbolism of illness, madness, and other forms of deprivation.

In many traditions, vital deficiencies – organic or psychic – are used to symbolize the highest degrees of knowledge and spirituality. For example, the planet Saturn, which is associated with the symbolism of the cosmic mountain and which, in both Islam and medieval Christianity (as in the Divine Comedy), symbolized the culminating stage of the human state, namely, the reconquest of the Adamic state and reintegration into the earthly Paradise, was figuratively represented as an old cripple.

Regarding psychic deficiencies, everyone knows the expression that designates Saint Francis of Assisi as “the madman of God,” the proverbial stupidity attributed to Saint Christopher – who, according to legend, offered himself to the Church as a porter because, desiring to save his soul, he couldn’t even memorize the prayers – and, not to go any further, the statement from the Sermon on the Mount, where the kingdom of heaven is promised to the “poor in spirit.” The symbolism of deprivation is analogous to that of extreme poverty.

These symbolisms are explained by the doctrine of the inversion of meanings, which necessarily accompanies every transition from one plane of reality to another. For example, at the level of natural realities, light is a symbol of knowledge, and darkness is a symbol of ignorance. However, once the portal of the sensible cosmos is surpassed, the symbolism is inverted, and the noche oscura referred to by Saint John of the Cross and the English mystics of the 13th century designates a higher stage than cosmic luminosity because it immediately precedes the knowledge of divine realities in the present and direct mode.

If, on the cosmic plane, black only represented deprivation or absence of light, on the plane of pure spirituality, it symbolizes the superabundance of divine light, which is the light of light and, to human eyes, appears as darkness. Surely, the black garb of priests is connected to this symbolism. But this symbolism is not uniquely Christian; we also find it in Islamic spirituality – the black band that symbolizes “the Abraham of your being” in Sufi schools – and also in Taoism, for example, in the ideogram of the I Ching called “The Obscuring of Intelligence.”

Likewise, the highest knowledge, the pure intellection of eternal essences, being of a purely interior and spiritual nature, surpasses the limits of the “mental” and, therefore, from the strictly human point of view, is not knowledge but ignorance: the docta ignorantia of Cardinal Cusa, the “poverty of spirit,” the science hidden from the learned and revealed to the humble, the divine wisdom that is foolishness in human eyes. Similarly, this symbolism of ignorance is not uniquely Christian, as it is central to Islamic spirituality, where, if the main hierophany is a Book, the Prophet to whom it was transmitted was precisely… an illiterate.

The symbolism of deprivation can go much further, and in its highest degrees, it turns into extinction. The great Saint Catherine of Siena hears Jesus say, “I am He who Is. You are she who is not.” Saint Paul “no longer lives”; it is Christ who lives in him. In Islamic spirituality, for example, we find the verse of the Sufi Jalal al-Din Rumi: “I am the ephemeral light that extinguishes in the body of eternal light.”

Obviously, all these symbolisms only make sense when viewed from the perspective of meaning inversions in the transition from one plane to another, according to the rule that “the last shall be first.”

As an unintended side effect of the same inversion, these symbolisms of deprivation, representing the highest degrees of achievement, are certainly among the most popular and cited, precisely because they are the least understood. They are cited without any awareness of their true meaning, and thus, they acquire a vague allegorical and even humorous coloring (“saints were crazy,” says Mother Miriam), which can lead to an inversion of the inversion, that is, a catastrophic literalness. The symbol is then confused with the symbolized thing, and if, on the plane of spiritual realization, it was an instrument of elevation of the intellect, on the plane of pure psychic phenomenality, it will become a tool of anti-spirituality and general debasement of consciousness.

Of course, a symbol is essentially what it symbolizes, but this does not mean that it is so in the realm of empirical phenomenality. A mentally challenged individual is essentially a symbol of supreme wisdom, precisely because, compared to this wisdom, human science is a babble of mental deficiency. However, this does not mean that, in their concrete individuality, they are actually a sage. Likewise, a crime can symbolize divine love (Christ’s death is not God’s sacrifice for the redemption of mankind?), but this does not mean that committing it is an act of love. A lion may symbolize monarchical power, but no monarchy has ever taken a lion from the zoo to place it on the throne.

Although all this is quite obvious when explained, modern mentality seems to tend, apparently deliberately and perversely, to blur the distinction between these two planes, valorizing deprivation, deficiency, madness, deviation, and crime in the realm of complete existence as if they were superior possibilities ignored by normal people. As if the latter, necessarily and by virtue of their own normality, should be philistines submerged in superficiality and inauthenticity, steeped in base pride and hypocrisy, and as if they should, to correct such sin, be ashamed of not being sick, deranged, murderers, or mad. It is suggested that it is out of humility and Christian charity that they should become such things, as every good human quality is a cause for humiliation for those who do not possess it and, therefore, a sin for those who do.

When the defense of revealed religion is placed on the same level as the defense of a nun who secretly gives birth and strangles her own child, we can imagine that this confusion of planes is institutionalized as an unshakable conviction, as a dogma of contemporary ideologies.

In the face of this, is it an exaggeration to believe in the warnings, whether from Berdyaev, Guénon, or Pope Paul VI, about the arch-enemy whose shadow spreads over more than one quadrant of the Earth?

Appendix

In the impossibility of fully transcribing the classes in which, contemporaneously to the edition of Madre Agnes, I addressed the issue of individual consciousness and its denial by collectivist and scientistic ideologies, I reproduce here some notes I took on the subject, at that time and afterwards. These notes are part of a Diary where I dump the ideas that I later plan to develop (holy delusion!) into extensive and systematic presentations.

I

The validity of “data” or “facts” always depends on the agreeable collective testimony. Collective testimony, on the other hand, depends on memory and communication – that is, it ultimately depends on the fidelity of the memory of each individual witness. Individual consciousness is a court of last resort, to which all collective beliefs must submit. The beliefs of the scientific community could not constitute an exception. Hence the complete absurdity that exists in the current trend of challenging the judgments of individual consciousness as mere subjective belief, in the name of such and such supposed scientific certainties that, if they are worth anything, it is because they were verified as such by the consciousness of each member of the scientific community. The denial of individual consciousness can only lead to grotesque aberrations, such as when the illustrious Hans-Georg Gadamer, a few pages after “demonstrating” that individual consciousness does not exist, that it is merely the casual effect of the introjection of social roles, criticizes university teaching for not promoting individual critical judgment – as if it were possible to repeal by the force of a rectorial ordinance something that was recognized as a constitutive limitation of the human condition.95

II

Critics of the philosophy of consciousness generally only know it in the Cartesian version, updated by French idealism and then by Husserl, and they believe that with two or three criticisms they can retire it and put in its place, as a criterion of truth, the agreeable testimony of the scientific community, as if the same skeptical and relativizing arguments did not apply to it.

One of the strategies for this purpose is to deny the universality of logical principles, or, which amounts to the same, their immanence in individual consciousness, in order to “demonstrate” that they are embedded in consciousness a posteriori, through the introjection of social roles.

All examples of this type of reasoning that I have seen to this day are fallacious, but some are perfectly senseless. Jean Piaget, in Wisdom and Illusions of Philosophy,96 denies the universality of the principle of identity, based on the example of the boy who, having counted seven little balls, guarantees that they are eight or nine as soon as they are lined up with larger intervals, without adding any. "When seven little balls become eight or nine like a seven-centimeter elastic that reaches eight or nine, is it the same principle of identity or a slightly different principle?", Piaget asks. And he ironically adds: “My philosophers had ready answers, but I forgot what they were”.

He must indeed have forgotten, otherwise he would not write such nonsense. Piaget is evidently not an ass, but he knows how to pretend to be an ass when it suits him. In this case, it was convenient for him not to understand that the boy simply did not distinguish between discrete quantity (the number of balls) and continuous quantity (the total space occupied), considering the set as a confused synthesis of the two; and that from the increase in the continuous quantity he deduced the discrete quantity. He deduced wrongly, but what does this have to do with the universality (or not) of the principle of identity? What happened there was simply a duality of meanings attributed to the term “balls”: the experimenter referred to the arithmetic set – abstract – of the seven balls, the boy to the concrete figure of the balls distributed in a certain space. To take into account only the balls, without the space, the boy would have to climb one more degree of abstraction, which, as Piaget himself shows in other works, he could only do a few years later.

Now, how to deduce, from the difference in the ability to abstract between adult and child (or between children of unequal age), the difference in their respective senses of identity? On the contrary, even the mistake made by the boy presupposes an awareness of identity, otherwise he could not recognize, in the set increased to eight balls, the same set that before had seven; the boy merely showed recognition that increase and decrease do not affect identity, which is perfectly correct and demonstrates that, even with deficient abstraction, he already has a perfect sense of identity.

On the other hand, it is clear that “identity” and “unity” are the same thing, and it is easier to recognize the identity of a substance, in the Aristotelian sense (this rabbit is this rabbit) than that of an “arithmetic set”, which is a conventional unity, a “mathematical whole”. That mathematical wholes should be regarded as units, regardless of not having a substantial unity, this is something that the child will only be able to admit when their mind is trained to accept as premises of reasoning certain mathematical conventions. This passage requires a rise in the degree of abstraction, and what is not understood is how the child could move from one level of abstraction to another without the permanence of the sense of identity. Piaget intends to see a duality of logical principles where there is only a difference of intentional contents in the perceptions of individuals.

Moreover, Piaget, who is the author of a Treatise on Logic, is perfectly illogical whenever he deals with situating the relationships between science and philosophy. He rejects all pretensions of philosophy to constitute knowledge “superior” to science (and even to constitute any knowledge at all), but recognizes philosophy as an “activity of coordination of values, including cognitive ones” (that is, the values that guide the scientificity of science). But how could a coordinating activity not be somehow “superior” to the coordinated elements? And what coordination of scientific truth values would have value if it did not itself base on a true criterion of truth?

Piaget, deep down, admits as a dogma the Kantian assumption that there is no passage from fact to value, an assumption that is only valid in the realm of the empirical, but which, on the scale of infinity, which is that of metaphysics, means nothing anymore; because there reigns the Unum, Verum, Bonum of Duns Scotus, or else we must admit that a creature called “man”, miraculously placed “outside” of infinity, creates from outside “values” that it projects and sticks onto infinity, like a deus ex machina. (By the way, to deduce from the fact of confusion between balls and space a duality of logical principles is not to pass from fact to value?)

III

What is reason? The common opinion assumes it to be merely logical thought: syllogistic deduction. Sometimes it is reduced to mathematical calculation.

But reason is, in fact, the innate sense of integrity, of the unity of reality – and, consequently, of the connection between its parts, aspects, modes, degrees, and moments. Sense of unity and, therefore, sense of proportions. All forms of rational thought – logic, calculation, etc. – are expressions of this same unique and central capacity, from which also emerge the aesthetic sense, prudence or practical wisdom, the instinct for moral coherence, etc.

It is clear, then, that, if we reduce reason to mere logical thought (which in itself is nothing but the sense of coherence applied to the microcosm of language), then we must seek some other foundation for the aesthetic, ethical sense, etc., and this foundation can only seem to us “irrational”, since logical language does not show itself, by itself, capable of sustaining it. But man could not have a sense of discourse coherence if he did not have a sense of coherence tout court.

The current limitation of the sense of reason, which serves to justify all the apologies for the irrational, errs at the base, by taking the species for the genus and attributing to the latter the limitations of the former, as if proposing that birds cannot fly, offering as proof the case of ostriches.

But this limitation also serves a second purpose: once it has been demonstrated that certain modes of logical reasoning are not universal, it is proclaimed that the universality of reason as such has been refuted. Then, with the same probity and rigor, it is decreed that reason is grafted onto the individual consciousness through learning, and, therefore, that it is not man who thinks, but society who thinks in his place, Q.E.D. It’s a never-ending con.

IV

Another, older strategy for attacking individual consciousness is the critique of sensory knowledge, accused, since Plato, of giving us a false image of the world; an image that can only, of course, be corrected by appealing to the consensus of the scientific community. Tertullian, in a text famous among students of Christianity but generally unknown to the average philosophy professor, already reduced Plato’s criticism of the senses to dust. But, reinforced by the Kantian sophisms about the impossibility of knowing the “thing in itself”97 and by the new image of the world created by 20th-century physics, it re-emerges with an increasingly imposing appearance of authority. Strengthened by the belief in this authority, many do not perceive the naivety in supposing that the scientific conception of a world made up of atoms and particles is “more true” than the habitual image captured by the five senses.

“This that you see appears to be a chair, but in reality, it is a conglomeration of waves and particles.” This statement resurfaces constantly in popular science books, opening the door to frightening speculations about the unreality of the world for naive readers' imaginations. Sometimes it comes adorned with an “Eastern” aura, using the word Maya, interpreted literally as illusion or deceit. But it only shows that in the same mind, relatively correct scientific knowledge can coexist with childish philosophical ideas.

For something that, on an infinitesimal scale, appears as moving particles, it reveals itself, at the scale of human perception, as the perfect and finished form of what we call a “chair.” How could one scale be “more true” than another scale? A scale is merely a system of measurements and comparisons between sizes of things. Is measuring in centimeters or inches “more true” than measuring in kilometers or leagues? On the scale of the immensely large, like nebulas, a chair would itself be an infinitesimal particle.

Scales cannot be true or false, only appropriate or inappropriate for certain practical purposes. “Chair” is the name of an object made by humans and is defined by the function attributed to it by humans. As this function – to serve as a seat – only makes sense in reference to human body measurements, it is more sensible to consider this object as a proper chair rather than a conglomeration of particles. Furthermore, the peculiar microscopic arrangement that forms a chair is substantially the same as that which forms raw wood: what differentiates a chair from a log or a trunk is its external, macroscopic shape, not the internal arrangement of particles: for atomic physics, there are no chairs, only carbon.

The sentence “this is a conglomeration of particles” thus applies to a chair equivocally, not univocally. It applies, in fact, to all material things, without distinction, and not to the species “chair.”

Our detractor of the reality of chairs could object that the predicates applicable to the genera necessarily apply to the species as well. However, it happens that his statement does not limit itself to predicating of the species what he predicated of the genus but instead denies the existence of the species by reducing it to the genus. Instead of simply saying, “This chair belongs to the genus of material things,” it categorically affirms, “This object is not a chair, but rather a material thing.” But how could a genus, by itself, be the negation of its species?

The way of thinking that reduces chairs to particles ends up denying the formal differences between beings in the name of the matter that composes them. But atoms, after all, are also forms, constituted of particles, and these, in turn, are forms constituted of other particles, so that in the end, we must deny the existence of atoms and particles, reducing everything that is not a supposed particle to nothingness.

The detractor of the sensible world could also argue that the world of particles is the most “true” because it is where the physical forces originate, which, on the macroscopic level, give the chair the form of a chair. Nonsense. The physical or chemical laws could not, by themselves, produce a chair; otherwise, chairs would sprout ready-made from trees. What shapes the materials into a chair is a human intention, which uses physical forces as mere elements to be reassembled and hierarchized according to the form of that intention.

V

Kant’s argument about the impossibility of knowing the “thing in itself” is the most remarkable example of how a gross sophism, presented in new terminology, can rise to the status of supreme truth.

Not that Kant is wrong in proclaiming that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. He just forgot to add that the thing-in-itself cannot even exist and that, therefore, the supposed limitation of human knowledge deduced from this unknowability consists only in the impossibility of knowing nothingness.

According to Kant, the thing-in-itself would be the existential substrate considered outside and independently of the categories of “our” mode of knowing. It has been correctly pointed out that “existence” is one of those categories, and therefore Kant contradicts himself by supposing the thing-in-itself as existing. But Kant’s error is much deeper and more serious. The very concept of the thing-in-itself is self-contradictory, as any relations that the supposed thing would have with anything else would have to be those same relations indicated in the list of categories, and thus the thing-in-itself can only be defined outside and independently of these relations. Now, a thing that had no relation to any other thing could not only not exist in any way in the real world but could not even be conceived as a pure logical possibility, as it is impossible to create a concept except by establishing its relations with other concepts. The thing-in-itself is not only unreal but also impossible. Even God Himself cannot be conceived as a thing-in-itself, as His creative Will necessarily includes – at least as an eternal possibility – the concept of created beings and, therefore, a relation. Hence, Kant not only attributes existence to something he himself placed outside the category of existence but also to something that, according to his own reasoning, is self-contradictory and impossible.

The expression “thing in itself” does not make sense. The only reality of a thing consists of being among other things, in a “world”: each entity is and only is for, by, in, within, without, etc., other entities. “The thing” is only isolable by mental abstraction, and supposing that it could then have some reality would be giving existence status to what only has logical and, so to speak, mental reality (and, moreover, only has the logical reality of a self-contradiction, that is, the concept of an impossibility). Now, among the other things with which each thing is interwoven and engaged in a network of relationships, the human subject, as an agent and knower, is included – why not? Should things be considered “more real” when conceived as existing in a world without human beings? The thing considered “without” a knowing subject is simply the unknown – and the unknown should not be considered more real than the known. If, worse yet, we carry the abstraction further, removing from the surroundings of the “thing in itself” not only the actual human subject but every possible subject, then the thing-in-itself will be nothing but the unknowable – and to proclaim the unknowable as existing will already proclaim that something is known about it…

VI

One can abstract understanding from this or that act of intellection, but not from every and any possible act of intellection; that is, one can abstract it from the psyche (natural) but not from intelligence. This is the difference between Husserl’s intellectualism and the formalism of logical-mathematicians, who make abstractions from intelligence.

There is a radical difference, and even a nature opposition, between conceptual abstraction and mathematical abstraction, to such an extent that the aptitude for one seldom comes along with the aptitude for the other, in the same man. A case like that of Leibniz, at the same time a great mathematician and a great philosopher, is more the exception than the rule. The greatest philosophers – Aristotle, Saint Thomas, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant himself, Schelling – only showed episodic and peripheral interest and an only mediocre aptitude for mathematics. Even Plato didn’t delve deep into them except to take numbers as symbols of forms, which is not a pure mathematical interest, in the modern sense; and besides, the modern sense of mathematics as paradigms of true thought and the excessive valorization of mathematical abstraction above conceptual abstraction could only arise and become dominant just as the emergence of capitalism – financial at first, industrial afterward – was depressing in the European mind the philosophical spirit and the love for truth and replacing them with the fascination for immediate practical efficiency, finally consecrated as the definitive form of thought in pragmatism and in ideological thought in general.

Mathematics has become the modern form of sophistry, and it is not surprising that it develops precisely alongside technomilitary power, as an instrument of domination, along with the supreme form of sophistic rhetoric: propaganda.

VII

Nothing takes away from me the idea that the secret inspiration of certain directions in philosophy in the 20th century, particularly mathematical logicism, neopositivism, the “scientific philosophy”, emanates from an parti pris unconfessed or unconscious for the industrial-capitalist society and against individual subjectivity which, for one reason or another, refuses to fit harmoniously into the specific type of rationality that organizes this society. And the psychological motivation of this parti pris is of the least noble: it comes from the desire of a certain person to feel “adult” and “integrated” and from the fear of falling back into the subjectivist whirlpool of adolescence. Too serious a belief in these philosophies expresses nothing less than a defense against oneself. The insecure young adult affirms and reaffirms their adequacy to capitalist rationality to suffocate the protest of juvenile subjectivity that still throbs within him.

Deep down, any “sincere” adherence to a limiting philosophy incapable of meeting human aspirations is an attempt to deny these longings in one’s own soul, that is, not to see the fundamental misfit of man in the world of instrumental rationality, which these philosophers take for reason tout court.

Such philosophers seem to me like young people recently employed in a large firm, who repeat the corporate discourse to themselves daily in the artificial attempt to imbue themselves with it, and to amputate from their own personality any desires incompatible with their career. It’s the one-dimensioning of man, as Marcuse saw well.

In this sense, the repeated attacks of the logicist and “scientific” philosophers against Frankfurt’s “romanticism” were only the preliminary rehearsal that prepared the absolutization of capitalism by Fukuyama.

III. My Favorite Film: Sunrise, by F. W. Murnau (1927). Cinema and Metaphysics

Technical Data

My Favorite Film: Sunrise, by F. W. Murnau (1927). Cinema and Metaphysics_

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Director: F.W. Murnau

Script: Carl Mayer

Based on the novel Die Reise Nach Tilsit (“Journey to Tilsit”), by Hermann Sudermann

Cinematography: Charles Rosher and Karl Struss

Music: Hugo Riesenfeld

Editing: Harold D. Schuster

Production: William Fox

Main Roles:

George O’Brien – The husband

Janet Gaynor – The wife

Margaret Livingston – The woman from the city

Sunrise, by F. W. Murnau98

Sunrise, by F. W. Murnau (Sunrise, 1927), based on the novel by Hermann Suderman, Journey to Tilsit, is for me the best film in the world. When one sees that the great Eisenstein did nothing more than join images with so much effort to produce, by association, some patriotic nonsense in service of communist propaganda, that’s when the art of Murnau surprises us with its ability to lead, through the play of images, to something that is above all image, and even above our capacity to express in words.

The plot unfolds on three levels: the character (the human being), nature, and the supernatural, all perfectly fitted together and without any appeal to indirect or “hermetic” language, in the sense of obscure, although there is a large dose of hermeticism there in the sense of spiritual alchemy.

The theme of Sunrise is the interplay between human decisions, the forces of nature, and the mysterious providence that orders everything without altering the apparent order of things, without producing events of an ostentatiously supernatural order, and playing only with natural elements.

The film begins with two lovers – a farmer from Tilsit and a tourist – making the most arbitrary decision one can imagine, a decision that is not based on anything: to run away, even if it means killing the farmer’s wife. This decision arises from a momentary passion, an extravagance founded on mere desire, which does not correspond to the meaning of life for either the woman (the girl who wants to run away with the farmer) or the farmer. It is not logically fitting into the normal framework of possibilities in their lives. The normal possibility would be that it all remains just a fortuitous episode, something like a holiday romance – which is what the affair really was, in essence. At the moment they decide to turn this holiday romance into a lasting union sanctified by murder, Murnau starts to superimpose another plot on the initial one.

If the character’s life before the affair had some solidity, he was not aware of it, or he would have categorically rejected the lover’s proposal. But he accepts it. He allows himself to step out of the logic of his life and into the mists of the imaginary. Not coincidentally, the scene where they meet to plan the murder takes place in a quagmire and amid fogs. He traverses a haze, as if leaving the real plane to enter the imaginary plane, where he will encounter his spectator.

The summary of the film is the gradual return of this mythical world to the reality the character had abandoned. After that brief moment when he prefers the imaginary to the real, for the rest of the time, we see the operations of fate to bring him back to real life. But this return is not easy. In the first moment, the farmer’s reaction is simply sentimental, feeling sorry for the wife he did not love, and regretful. But this regret is not yet his accomplishment; it happens passively and in the realm of immediacy. The return to reality will have to pass through the reconstruction of all the elements that made up his life.

When, after the failed attempt to murder, he accompanies his wife to the city, she is still very sad, and he tries to restart the dialogue with her – after all, he had become a stranger. He tries to reclaim the role of a husband, as if saying, “I am not a murderer, I am not a stranger,” but he is no longer the same. He will have to rediscover his old identity, and evidently, that is not so easy.

There are two decisive scenes: the one in which he offers her a pastry at the tea house, and she ends up not accepting it; and the scene of the wedding they witness at the church. In this wedding, not coincidentally again, the guests are at the door, waiting for the newlyweds' exit, but they come out instead, having walked ahead of the bride and groom and not noticing what is happening around them. In the church, he becomes aware again of the meaning of the marriage, why he was there, why he was standing next to that woman who until a few hours ago meant nothing to him. In a way, he has a recapitulation of his entire existence.

At the moment he gives up on killing his wife, he had already repented inside, but it wasn’t exactly repentance in the Christian sense. It was remorse. What is remorse? A despairing feeling of guilt. Repentance is a feeling of guilt accompanied by relief, with hope to somehow redeem what was lost. The man goes through this only in the church: at that moment, he exchanges remorse for repentance.

But the plot has not yet complicated. He needs to confirm this intention. He needs to acquire absolute certainty about his recovered identity. In the moment he accepted to kill, he threw away his whole life; he acted as if he were someone else. Someone with a different life, in a different place, with another woman. In the scene where the lover talks about city life and he imagines himself dancing in nightclubs, he envisions another biography for himself, miraculously starting from scratch.

After building a whole life as a countryman, he suddenly finds himself in another scene, and to truly live it, he would have needed to have a completely different life, work in a different profession, be born in a different place. The allure of this imaginary life numbs him to the extent that he loses his identity: he is no longer connected to his wife, his profession, his material surroundings, nothing. He is disconnected from the meaning of life, and thus, this life seems empty and tedious to him – it is psychological vanity projecting the inner misery of a man unable to fulfill his vital duty onto the world around him.

The rest of the film will reinsert him, first, into his life; second, into his marriage; third, into the place where he built his life, to return him to the meaning of life that he momentarily abandoned for a crazy dream. And how will this happen? He will be forced, through the unfolding of events, to recommit, repeatedly, to the value of everything he had scorned and will have to bet higher and higher. He regains, through a conscious act of will, everything he had abandoned out of vanity.

He starts by asking for forgiveness; then he offers the pastry; later, at the church, he experiences a second repentance and makes a vow; he takes a photograph, almost like a wedding picture; and finally, he goes to an amusement park, which would be the equivalent of a honeymoon trip. With all of this, he has regained his identity as a husband, but he has not yet regained the meaning of his life. For that, he will need to bet a little more.

The bet will be a second temptation, which no longer comes through human means but through the elements of nature, almost deliberately mobilized for this purpose, which execute his intention, i.e., they really drown the woman he had tried to drown before. You see, what he dreamed of is no longer him carrying it out; it is an immensely greater power than his own. He asked, and heaven executed. At that moment, he has to make the decisive bet to save the woman he had wanted to kill.

As he is returning home, the storm occurs, and in this return, he also fully regains the meaning of his life. He says a series of “yes” to everything he had previously said “no” to. But who opposes this “yes,” who is the tempter offering him “no” again? Now it is no longer the devil; it is God Himself, to see if he really wants it. The film is theologically accurate in showing that the devil acts by dominating imagination, fantasy, and desires, while God acts through real events, the realm of nature transformed into a messenger of the supernatural.

The character will then be obliged to reaffirm with much greater force his adherence to all the values he had scorned. And now he will have to risk his own life to defend them and, even more, to risk his soul’s salvation; because he cannot avoid feeling revolted against heaven when he thinks the woman died, and he feels trapped in a terrible trap set by the devil, who executed the request he had already given up. He has to reaffirm and bet everything again, this time fighting against all apparent odds.

Sunrise, in fact, unfolds backward. The change from the farmer to the city, planned at the beginning, does not happen, and everything important happens on the return from the city to the countryside, where he will set his feet on the ground again.

The film has something of a “coming-of-age novel” (Bildungsroman), a genre typically German, which concludes with the formation of the human personality, where the individual, through their errors, becomes a true man. An example is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Goethe. Herman Hesse also did this in Steppenwolf and Demian. These are novels whose only conclusion is human growth towards maturity. But this growth is always a decrease, the individual returning to the earth after having dreamed some madness and traveled through a sky of lies. It is a characteristically German apologia for “calling a spade a spade” as the supreme value of existence.

The idea is, therefore, that the meaning of existence is placed within existence itself: it has meaning in itself and not in another world above this one, like the imaginary world the lover offers to the character, which is somewhat like the false theatrical vocation of Wilhelm Meister. He dreams of being an actor but is not fit to be one. He is not an actor; he is a bourgeois, ultimately, and his discovery that he is an upper-middle-class bourgeois, a solid bourgeois, is his true education. The everyday life of a bourgeois, insofar as it is real, and simply because it is real, has a magical power superior to all imagination because it is not made up of images; it has a three-dimensionality that fantasy lacks.

The imaginary world offered by the devilish tempter is a two-dimensional world, a world of images, images in the midst of the fog. The scene where the farmer and the lover talk in the marsh refers to Tarot card 18, The Moon: the man on one side, the woman on the other, like the dog and the wolf; water below, and the moon in the middle, forming a diamond shape. This “moon world” is the world of reflections on water, where things do not truly happen, they only appear to. The image may be enchanting, but it lacks the three-dimensionality, the depth of real life. It is upon returning to the earth that man finds the true sky, the meaning of life.

Now, the most astonishing thing about this real life is precisely that things do not have a final explanation in it, whereas the imaginary world is easily understandable and explicable simply because you imagined it yourself. When the character imagines a different life in the city, everything makes sense to him because he wants things to be one way or another. The cause-and-effect relationship is perfectly clear. But in the return to real life, the play of cause and effect is infinitely more complicated, more subtle, and you can never say that this happened solely because of that; there is always a fabric, a tangle of causes, and a single causal line can never be pointed out.

So why does the storm happen just as he was returning? It could have happened at any other time. There is not the slightest magical insinuation about it in the film. It was not an angel who made the storm fall; instead, if it had not happened, the resolution of the meaning of this individual’s life would certainly have taken a different direction. Natural causes interfere, and we never know if there is purpose in them or not. We cannot precisely say, “God made the storm fall for such and such a purpose,” because God does not appear in the film; only the storm does. Everyone is free to interpret this as either divine intention or mere chance, but in both cases, this event becomes a component of the meaning overall.

When the storm falls and the woman drowns, nothing in the film allows us to interpret that God purposely made it happen to teach something to the character. God does not appear, and there is no hint of an evident religious meaning involved in the situation. We simply see the storm, we see what happened. We cannot say it was a divine cause, or a fortuitous natural cause, but in either case, this event fits not within the order of causes but within the order of meaning, and the divine causal force appears not as the efficient cause but only as the final cause, acting through the natural combination of efficient causes.

Whatever the cause may be, for the character, that event has a very clear meaning, not subjectively, but objectively, within his real life. And what is that meaning? It is the malevolence of which he had already given up, and which is carried out just at the moment he had renounced it and feared it. His thoughts become actions at the exact moment he no longer accepts them. This meaning is not subjective; it is not the character interpreting things this way: they simply are like that, in themselves and objectively.

Without needing to resort to the idea of a providence that deliberately is “making this happen” or “that happen” – and this is one of the most beautiful things about the film – the event has an objective meaning, and this meaning, through purely natural means, goes in the direction indicated by divine intentionality, which is the reconquest of the meaning of life. It is a sort of irony of nature, and for moments, the character feels like a victim of this irony. It may be premeditated or fortuitous; that does not make it any less ironic. To him, at that moment, it matters little if the devil made it rain to harm him or if nature innocently and almost mechanically produced the rain. The storm is ironic in both cases, and in both cases, it makes sense.

There is a very clear distinction between the order of causes and the order of meaning. However, this meaning is not subjective; it is not merely human; it is a real meaning: within the context of events, the storm has a clear significance, it is a cruel irony of nature, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. In fact, if it was not intentional, it is even more cruel, as the character’s fate appears even more absurd. Suddenly, he falls completely into the absurdity he had premeditated. If there was intent behind the events, it was pedagogical intent, and if not, it was an ironic coincidence.

This irony is already evident in the episode with the dog. Why does the dog, when they are about to leave by boat, start barking and follow its owner? Is it because it foresaw that a tragedy would occur? Or is it simply because it wants to follow its owner? The film does not say anything about this. You are free to interpret it as you wish. But regardless of how you interpret the cause that made the dog move, what matters is not the cause but the meaning that this episode ultimately takes within the whole story. Why? Because, upon returning to leave the dog at home, the man could have given up on the trip and the murderous plan.

The dog appears either as a coincidence or as an intentionality that could have saved the woman beforehand and blocked the subsequent course of events. It could have, but it failed. The dog didn’t have enough strength; it is a natural element too isolated and weak to determine the course of events on its own. The dog, pure natural instinct, is powerless to stop the evil; for that, the mobilization of all elements of nature – the storm – is needed.

But at every moment, no matter the cause, the meaning is clear. And this meaning is not subjective. In fact, the dog’s action at that moment could have prevented the tragedy. It almost did. And this is another characteristic of this film: all the time, you try to predict what will happen next, and this prediction takes on the aspect of a leap of faith: you wish things to take a certain turn, you hope that it happens – and, since what you wish never happens, in the end, the result is achieved through the most unpremeditated and surprising means, exactly the one you desired. When you know that the man is going to take the boat to kill that innocent woman, you wish he wouldn’t do it. And when the dog starts barking and follows, the dog is, in a way, fulfilling your wish, but it fails.

In this scene, everyone hesitates: you, the dog, the character, the woman – she is also in doubt. She is also questioning. All these elements, all these facts, always have a very clear meaning, always related to what came before and what comes after. At no time do we depend on the subjective interpretation that the characters make.

Based on simple psychological elements, this deeply enigmatic story is created, in which all the elements contribute, after all, to an awareness and to the character regaining control of his life. It is implied throughout the entire film that everything is leading to a final meaning. But whether this occurs through premeditation or not is a question left open. Not knowing which elements determined one’s destiny is part of life’s reality. But also part of life is being able to understand the meaning of what is happening. I don’t know who made it rain, nor with what intention, but I know that for the constitutive order of my life, at this moment, the rain has a very clear meaning.

What is meaning? It is the moral obligation of an action, which in turn makes sense within the course of my life and my own identity. Being who I am, living the way I live, I have an obligation to do this and that, because only then will my life make sense. Viktor Frankl would jump with enthusiasm if he saw this film.

The metaphysical interpretation is conditioned by an ethical interpretation that precedes it in a certain way. Regardless of whether there is providence behind everything or not, the meaning of events is imposed as it imposes the obligation to act in a certain way, because it is the only one that makes sense. The problem of providence is not in the causal sphere, but in the sphere of meaning, regardless of whether this providence acts through natural or supernatural causes.

The rain may be a mere coincidence. Consider this from God’s point of view. If it had already been predetermined by natural laws that it would rain at that specific moment, God certainly knew that, and He wouldn’t need to send rain specifically so that things would be resolved in this or that way. The mere sum of natural and human causes is enough to create meaning. Providence is there for what, then? To create and maintain meaning.

The providence, being supernatural, doesn’t necessarily need to resort to supernatural means. From the simple interplay of natural and human causes in an indefinite number, there will be a result x. There was no need for premeditation in that specific case: everything was already ordered in such a way that the man, being a thinking being who always tends to create a unity of meaning in his life, would take advantage of the events, whatever they were, to fulfill that meaning. In this way, the very fortuitous nature of events is somehow overcome. They are fortuitous regarding their efficient causality, that is, what triggered them, but not regarding their final cause. In other words: a heap of scattered efficient causes can contribute to a final cause that is fundamentally good. This is an element of Leibniz’s philosophy (Principle of the Best). I don’t know if Murnau thought of Leibniz at this moment, but being Leibnizian doesn’t require having read Leibniz; it’s a matter of personality and spontaneous spiritual affinity. In any case, it is not useless to remember that before dedicating himself to cinema, Murnau studied philosophy and theology.

In another film of his, Tabu, there is a message seemingly contrary in meaning: human and natural causality leading to a tragic outcome. That can also happen. In any case, whether everything ends in comedy (when everything ends well it’s comedy, no matter how much we suffer) or in tragedy, is not decided in the realm of efficient causes but in the realm of the final cause, and with that, we escape the famous polemic between determinism and free will.

Both things somehow demand each other; one cannot conceive one without the other. There is determinism insofar as certain triggered causes will inevitably produce certain results. We can take the natural causes that appear in this film, such as the dog’s behavior and the storm, as simple results of natural laws. There are natural processes that explain these facts. It may all be predetermined in the order of efficient causes, but nothing can be predetermined regarding the end, the purpose. There would be no point in creating a being capable of choosing, acting, and even feeling guilty if the purpose of their life was already infallibly given in advance. That would be a nonsense: a conscious actor is not needed to play a mechanical role; a being as intelligent as man is not required to play such a role. Therefore, there is a certain margin of maneuver within the determinism of nature itself. The meaning of life exists, but its realization by man is eminently fallible.

We can say that the dog “would not have” any other alternative but to follow its owner, because that is its instinct, and the rain would also not have any other alternative but to fall at that precise moment. The man is the one who has the alternative of understanding or not understanding what is happening and of directing his life in a way that is harmonized with the natural framework, with his duty, and the meaning of his life. To fulfill the meaning of his life, he needs to understand what is happening around him and how these things influence him.

The events (like the mistress, who did not exist in the character’s life and arrived on vacation at a certain place at a certain moment, that is, intervening) happen and come from the environment around him. The individual himself is the one who understands or does not understand. And not understanding is as simple as disconnecting for a moment from this dense fabric of causality and entering another world where he himself is the only cause; it is the world of imagination, a world entirely logical and clear, where he invents causes, and the effects follow in the most logical way possible. It is the logic of the criminal plan proposed by the visitor: we kill your wife, go to the city, and you’ll live there with me, and we’ll dance at that nightclub where I always go, etc., etc., etc. All of this is very logical, in a linear way.

In returning to real life, the causalities are no longer linear but concomitant and in an uncountable number. The connection between them can be perceived or not, because the individual himself is a link in many crossed causal chains. It is one thing for it to rain, and another for it to rain when you are there. Even from a purely natural, physical point of view, it is not the same to rain on ground where there is no living being, on ground with plants, on ground with animals, and on ground with people. The consequences of the rain will inevitably be different in these various cases. In the present case, it rains at the exact moment when that citizen is there; therefore, this rain is no longer the same for everyone; it has different meanings.

He could have not understood the situation. He could have been so devastated by the death of his wife that he wouldn’t even sense the irony of the situation, nor draw the moral lesson implied. He agrees to draw this lesson because he continues to engage in moral dialogue with nature, asking, "What do you want from me?". In other words: trusting the meaning of life even when this meaning has become invisible due to the mistakes he made. Now, nature never answers completely, but it is the human being who completes its answers. And to respond, he responds by assuming the meaning and all the implications, the real implications that it has. Or he fantasizes about it, invents, escapes from duty and the meaning of life.

When we see that all of this was conveyed only with silent images, we realize that this film is truly an astonishing masterpiece. In the sense of playing with a multitude of causes to provoke a final effect, there is an analogy between Sunrise and The Tempest by Shakespeare, but the difference is that in the latter, there is an agent directing the causes, which is the magician Prospero, whereas here, there is none. Here, no magician appears; you don’t even know who is directing the scene or even if it is being directed. What you do know is that it makes tremendous sense.

Asking whether this was premeditated or not is entirely futile because the question is not that; the question is not who is directing and with what purpose, the question is: what exactly is happening? Is it just any other rain? No. It is the rain that happens at this moment and kills the woman the man wanted to kill half an hour ago. The moment this happens is not indifferent. Real life is precisely this density in which all factors are absolutely inseparable, and the only thing truly at stake is whether you will accept this density or if you will escape to another world, a plan without gravity, the world of subjective fantasy. It is precisely this drama that gives the film all its value and impact.

The story that the character himself had invented he understood perfectly well, but, and this other story that actually happens to him? There are so many factors at play that he could not have a complete explanation. To understand everything that happened, he would have to be God.

Imagine the number of causes that would need to be investigated to know why there was such a convergence of events. That is something no one will ever have. At no point will there be a complete explanation of everything that happened. However, far from understanding this in the vulgar sense of “limitations of human knowledge,” there is a precious indication of the very nature of reality: reality is only real when, within it, the finite set of known elements, which in themselves may not make sense, is encompassed by an infinity that, incognizable in itself, gives unity and meaning to the finite frame. Whenever the finite closes itself off, pretending to be self-explanatory, we are in the realm of optimistic and Promethean logical fantasy. And whenever the finite dissolves into an infinite without meaning, we are in the realm of macabre fantasy. It is in the sensible articulation of the finite in the infinite that the knowledge of reality is found.

The meaning of the character’s life is not only not subjective; it is, so to speak, a historical meaning. The character is this man and no other; he had this life and no other; in short, he is not free to feel whatever he wants whenever he wants. He will feel according to what happened before and according to what he intends to happen afterward.

Just when the individual was returning home, hoping to return to his domestic peace after everything he had experienced, after temptation and remorse, at that moment, the rain falls, and it has this meaning because it fits in the sequence of what came before and after, not because the individual “felt” this or that. In fact, he could not feel anything; he could become numb. Many people, faced with suffering of this kind, when life performs its macabre fantasy, go mad and don’t want to think anymore. Then they lose the perception of the meaning of what is happening, but that meaning remains present and can be recognized by those who, from the outside, observe what is going on.

The price of the meaning of life is to understand what is happening, no matter how much it hurts. But always to understand from the human point of view and without having the global explanation. Now, this is crucial for the philosophy student, for the following reason: in any metaphysical investigation, the human tendency is always to fly directly to the problem of providence, determinism, divine intentionality, dealing with these themes in a generic and abstract manner, without having this prior grounding in the sense of personal life, which is evidently the only intermediary through which one could arrive at an understanding of divine intentionality. If you don’t even understand what events represent within the plot of your life, how are you going to understand the intentions of the Writer who produced the work? If you don’t even understand the story, how will you understand the psychology of the Author?

It is ridiculous that people with dull souls, incapable of grasping and responsibly assuming the meaning of their own lives, meddle in philosophical issues simply because they have read Kant or Heidegger. “Primum vivere deinde philosophari” has precisely this meaning: the true philosopher is a philosopher in real life and not just a scholar who talks about philosophy. That’s why metaphysical inquiry can never be a mere abstract investigation in the scientific and impersonal sense, but it will always imply personal responsibility. And the question that arises is: do you accept to understand what is happening in your life? And to what extent can you endure it? Eighty percent of the philosophers to whom you asked this question would run away in fear because there are certain things that are terrible to understand, especially the consequences of what each one has done in life.

Let’s construct the hypothesis that there is a God, that He knows your thoughts, and that He can, as in this case, make your worst thoughts come true. Do you want to know this God? The majority of people, at that point, would no longer want to know. It’s better not to know. Here comes the famous emotion of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “machine of the world,” when the individual, after investigating and questioning his whole life, at the moment when the Universe is finally about to open up and show everything, he says: “I don’t want to know anymore.”

[...]

as dead beliefs summoned

quick and quivering were not produced

to dye anew the neutral face

that I, through the paths, display,

and as if another being, no longer that

inhabitant of me for so many years,

began to command my will

which, already fickle, closed

like these hesitant flowers

open and closed in themselves;

as if a belated gift were no longer

desirable, but despised,

I lowered my eyes, uninterested, tired,

disdaining to gather the offered thing

that opened freely to my ingenuity.

The strictest darkness had already settled

over the road of Minas, rocky,

and the machine of the world, repelled,

was subtly recomposing itself,

while I, assessing what I had lost,

proceeded slowly, hands pensively.

(Excerpts from “The machine of the world,” Claro Enigma, Carlos Drummond de Andrade)

Access to metaphysical knowledge must first go through knowledge of moral and ethical order, which does not consist of “following” an already given and ready-made moral or ethics, but, on the contrary, in genuinely desiring to understand one’s own life and fulfill its meaning, assuming the duty with all one’s strength, because it is in real life that you will find the link between the natural and the supernatural. And where else could the supernatural act if not in the real, in this historical and human world where we live?

Nature is already given; it is a fact that is before us. It is already resolved, if not eternally, at least habitually; although there is a coefficient of indeterminism in nature, at least on the macroscopic level, in the realm of visible nature, things work according to a certain regularity in which you do not interfere. Human interference in natural processes is minimal.

So, where else are you going to interfere? In the supernatural? No, the supernatural is God, is all-powerful, and you cannot meddle there. So, you can’t meddle either in nature or in the supernatural. You are placed, so to speak, in nature, but a little above it, to the extent that you can see nature as a whole and inquire about something that is beyond it but where you cannot reach. So, where are you? Exactly between one and the other. Between a set that you see but do not understand, and another that, if you know, you will understand, but you do not know.

Nature is visible and knowable; it is before us, but we do not understand it because it does not seem to have intentionality. Sometimes it seems so, sometimes it doesn’t, so you don’t know. How are we going to know? Well, we need to inquire about what is beyond nature, what is above it and determines it.

In short, we need to converse with the Author of the story. If you knew the Author of the story, everything would be explained; but you do not know Him. What you know, you do not understand, and what you understand, you do not know. God is perfectly understandable; when you start thinking about God, you see that everything makes tremendous sense, but we do not see Him, we do not hear Him, and we do not know Him. And everything we see, hear, and know does not always make sense. You have the fact below and the meaning above. You would like to ascend to this meaning. But where is the link? It’s within you, because you also exist materially, that is, you are an object of your own knowledge, you know your own body, your own life, exactly as you know nature.

And what is the meaning of your life? You have the reality of your life, but what is its meaning? In relation to yourself, you are also divided. You know the reality of your existence, but not its meaning. The meaning, of course, makes sense, but you do not know it. And life, you know, but you do not know if it makes sense. So, you are this link, because at every moment you can connect the sphere of facts with the sphere of meaning. How do you do that? By understanding the meaning that the facts impose, not abstractly and in themselves, but in relation to your historical life.

Only to the extent that you accept understanding this meaning that is in your own life, you have, at the same time, the openness to that greater bond that exists between the natural and the supernatural. The relationship between your life and the meaning of your life is the same as that between nature and God. Since you are the only link, there is something that must be resolved in your sphere and on your scale before you can seriously inquire about metaphysical matters.

Now, when we understand this, each one of us can also ask the following question: what are the facts that were decisive for my destiny? And if you start narrating your story properly, you will see that there were facts that determined your real destiny, without you having a say, without being consulted, and sometimes without even perceiving them. In other people’s lives, we can see this very well; in ours, it takes an effort.

For example, you set up a store. After an economic crisis in Zambia that changes the international trade of a product, your store collapses. You don’t need to know all the details of that economic crisis, where it started, or its size. You just know that your store collapsed. Now, I ask you: do you want to see the size of the enemy that destroyed your store? Do you want to see the size of the elephant that stepped on you or not? Do you really want to know what determines your life?

Note that we are not talking about supernatural causes; we are talking about socioeconomic causes. At that moment, most people lower their eyes like the character in “The Machine of the World.” They don’t want to see, and not wanting to, they go back to the condition of an animal – a living being whose life has no meaning, whose life doesn’t need to have meaning, and who only hopes to die as quickly as possible.

From that moment on, even the effort the individual makes to attend to their vital impulses, their desires, will only serve an instinct of death. What is the final result of biological life? Death. It is the only result to which biological life can lead. So, when you limit your life to the biological, charming as it may still seem, you know you are only heading toward death and nothing else. The renunciation of meaning takes away life itself.

Knowing the meaning of life presupposes knowing the meaning of the things that happen as life unfolds. But the apprehension of this meaning sometimes implies knowledge of terrible forces, forces on a historical, social, planetary, or supraplanetary scale. Suppose, for example, that planets have some influence on your life. Suppose that a planet moving in its planetary orbit can cause an effect in your life. How are you going to dialogue with a monster of that size?

Most people, out of fear, do not want to lift their eyes to see what determines their lives. But the acquisition of the meaning of life presupposes the acquisition of the meaning of the cosmic scenario in which you are; not in itself, as is done ecologically, but as the stage of the play that is your life. Starting from where you are, consciousness can expand in ever larger concentric circles, gradually understanding the set of factors that objectively determine your existence. And as this awareness expands, the personal duty that gives meaning to your life becomes clearer. And then you no longer seek protection in cowardly unconsciousness (pretended at first but with time becomes unconsciousness itself) but in duty, which infuses you with ever greater courage.

It so happens that, when someone does this, they see that it is almost a miracle to make any decision amidst all these enormously powerful factors. At that moment, the individual is forced to see the most brutal reality of human life: the fragility of individual power.

The expansion of consciousness presupposes a retraction of pretensions and a loss of egocentrism, and at this point, most people back down. To not lose that false initial sense of security, that illusion that they are the center of the world, that they freely decide their lives, the person closes their eyes to the machine of the world, lowers their head, and from then on is like a sheep, or a pig, or a goose; but a sheep, a pig, or a goose who still harbors the illusion that they are something great.

In this specific sense, the character in the film accepts the human condition as fully as possible. He understands and assumes what is happening. He understands that his life is determined by a dialogue, a confrontation with infinitely powerful forces, forces that can even play a sinister joke on him. In fact, the title of the film – Aurora, sunrise – has a very obvious reason. The character in the film is the true twice-born, reborn in God, reborn in the realm of the Spirit.

It is obvious that there are factors that he can ignore, but that never ignore him. We can ignore cosmic or historical phenomena, but they affect us; we don’t know about them, but they know about us. It’s like a Jew in Nazi Germany: he could ignore the Führer, but the Führer did not ignore him. It’s like a Christian in the USSR: he can ignore Stalin, but Stalin knows him very well. At some point, this scenario takes on a sinister configuration. And can you bear to see it? Do you want to know or not?

At this point, it is decided whether the person will be worthy of the human condition or whether they will incur that self-spiritual castration, which is the worst loss one can experience and which no material compensation can make up for. The person who gives up knowing the factors that determine their life, their biography, has given up on this life and this biography. They no longer value it, they have thrown it away. Now, at best, they are reduced to a child who, oblivious to everything around them, asks for miracles or curses fate, society, God Himself. From this point on, only a miracle, indeed. But asking for a miracle is something cursed by Christ Himself. “Cursed is the human generation that asks for wonders.” And how is the person going to get wonders if they don’t even want to look at the nature around them, look at the real world where these wonders happen every moment?

Here we must quote a phrase from old Gurdjieff (I don’t like him, but he has some incredible verbal findings), who says that most prayers consist of asking for two plus two to be five. The individual does not exactly know what to ask for. Now, if they don’t look at the reality around them, they don’t know where they are, and therefore, they don’t know what they want either. They will ask for anything, something meaningless. By doing this, they are refusing the gift of the Spirit, they are committing the first sin: “I do not want to be a conscious and responsible individual being; I want to be an animal that knows nothing; I want to remain in the state of animal innocence.” They want to sin against the Spirit and still want God to work a miracle? All sins are forgiven, except this one.

That’s why I see a deep blasphemy in the vulgar praise of “simple life,” of “simple people.” This is an aspect that has never been well studied. Authentic evangelical simplicity precisely consists of asking for little, not needing much, and not living like an animal that ignores the world around it. This ignorance is to refuse the gift of the Spirit, and this is the sin that is neither forgiven in this life nor in the next, the worst of sins. Everything is forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit. What is this sin? Willful ignorance – and there are still those who call this “evangelical simplicity.”

The lack of inquiry into the meaning of life, the depreciation of this search, or its reduction to an academic curiosity, as if it were disconnected from the axis of life, is contempt for the Spirit. If the person does this and then reads the Bible, prays, they are wasting their time. It is nonsense: they have already informed God that they want nothing to do with Him.

This despiritualization is the total absorption of the individual in the tasks of subsistence, including the tasks of pleasure, which are also for subsistence. You need a certain quota of sexual and gastronomic pleasure simply to survive, just as you need a certain amount of painful effort to survive. As long as the individual is limited to these two things, they have opted for natural life and want nothing to do with the supernatural. If they want to know the supernatural, they will have to go through this interface, which is the meaning of their own life.

To know the meaning of something, you first need to know what that thing is. – "What am I?", "Where am I?", "What am I doing here?", "What is happening to me?", and “What direction is my life taking?”

For example, do you really want to know all the malignant hereditary impulses you inherited from your ancestors? Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, smugglers, pimps, snitches – do you want to see all of that? Dante calls this a descent into hell: recognizing the lower possibilities that still exist within you. Do you want to see this? – “No, I don’t want to,” says the majority. So, if you don’t want to, there’s no point in praying because the function of the Holy Spirit is to precisely reveal this to you.

Through a firm and intelligent gaze, you can overcome all the evil within you. If you are capable of knowing and looking, you are already above your own inner evil; if you don’t want to see, you are still below it. We are not afraid of what is inferior to us. Only when you want to see this whole set, these possibilities are burned just by being seen, they become part of your cognitive world, and in a way, you are already above them.

Therefore, if we think with fire and iron, the idea of today’s “realistic” concern with repetitive everyday life is an escape from the Spirit, a succession of painkillers. When a great misfortune occurs, the individual asks, “Why did this happen to me?” It’s a good question, but before asking about the misfortune, they should have asked a series of other things. No, they wait to ask questions only when the misfortune happens. Well, misfortune can be complicated, and they might not understand it.

The situation of the character in the movie is evidently an ideal situation, therefore artistically simplified. It’s an individual who had never thought about anything and suddenly has to understand everything. And they do understand. Well, they understand because it’s a movie, a simplified, symbolic scheme of life. In reality, if someone spends their whole life willfully ignoring everything that happens, when a misfortune occurs, they won’t understand either; they’ll become even more foolish than they were before.

I don’t believe that leaving everything to the last minute can be beneficial, except in the movies. In the movies, there’s an idiot suddenly thrown into a tragic situation, where they have to understand everything, and they truly understand. And at the moment they understand, their comprehension has a cathartic function. When they become aware of what happened, they discharge the evil that was in the situation, and that evil instantly turns into good, and their wife is saved.

I don’t deny that there might be, in this sense, a magical performance of human beings on the historical and even cosmic scene, to the extent that they understand evil and, by understanding, express and sublimate it in some way, just as Thomas Mann said, some predictions are made precisely so that they do not come true.

But what if nobody wants to see the evil? Then it will happen anyway. If you don’t want to see, everything will act in the realm of mechanization, of causes that are already acting independently of you and will inevitably reach their ends. If you perceive and absorb this impact, your awareness can have a cathartic function capable of benefiting many human beings around you.

That’s why, in general, prophets and great mystics tend to be sadder than joyful because they know what is happening. They can foresee certain outcomes that others do not foresee, and they already know what will go wrong. Muhammad would look at a person and knew that the person was already in hell, that he couldn’t do anything for him, so he wept. But this is a last resort. It’s not necessary to foresee the person in hell, but it is impossible that nobody can foresee a person in a gas chamber or facing a firing squad. However, in situations where this evil approaches, many wait to become aware at the last moment.

Every tragedy has this element: to see or not to want to see? In ancient tragedy, this not-seeing does not involve guilt. Ancient tragedy assumes a certain limitation of human intelligence. It’s an extreme case where, even acting at their best, humans wouldn’t understand, so they become an innocent victim of the cosmic game.

In the Christian sphere, this is no longer acceptable, and there is always a sense of guilt, which is why the tragic genre does not flourish much here. In the Christian world, the one who didn’t want to see is guilty. There is always room for maneuver: things could have been different. There may be a horrible outcome, but not a tragic one because it’s not fatal. It was a wrong choice. Paradoxically, guilt restores freedom because by assuming guilt, the individual, in a way, conquers fatal destiny. People who casually speak against the Christian sense of guilt do not understand or pretend not to understand that the only alternative to it is a return to the Greek tragic fate where the innocent is always condemned. The enemies of the feeling of guilt are the enemies of freedom.

But there are different ways to understand, for example, the story of Adam. Did Adam err by fate, or did he have room for maneuver? Could he see what was happening, or was he a poor victim of circumstances? The Muslim interpretation says it was a simple intellectual slip, which is why they don’t accept original sin: anyone would have made the same mistake as Adam did. However, it’s necessary to understand that the Islamic perspective, in this case, refers to the human species and not to the individual. In the realm of individual actions, there is indeed guilt. What Islam professes, in essence, is that Adam’s sin was cognitive and not strictly moral.

Epilogue

The recording of this lecture ends abruptly. But I remember finishing by saying that Sunrise, a work by a filmmaker who was a profound scholar of philosophy, religion, symbolism, and esotericism, was a pinnacle of artistic achievement that cinema had never surpassed, precisely because in it images directly and without any enigmatic language condensed the highest problems of the metaphysics of destiny and providence, with a subtlety worthy of Saint Augustine and Leibniz. I continue to say this and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau remains for me the greatest film director of all time, until proven otherwise.

June 1997.

IV. Central Station

1. In the Heart of Brazil

Everyone has already written and spoken about Central Station, and I could very well refrain from touching on the subject if the things I read and heard about did not seem, in general, more outrageous than I can bear in silence. I am not only referring to the manifestations of hypocritical generosity that rush to socialize the glory of Walter Salles, as if a prize were not a distinction but precisely the opposite – an egalitarian division of merits among those who have and those who do not. I refer to the opinions that pretend to go a little beyond the feigned compliments, to delve deep into the understanding of the work and bring to the destitute viewer who understands nothing for himself the lights of superior intellectuality that guide us. What would we be, indeed, without the help of these kind creatures that are stipended by the State to tell us what is right and wrong, that is, respectively, the left and right of all phenomena of the world?

In the exercise of their craft, priesthood, or militancy, these people have extensively discussed the “ideology” of Central Station. And since in Brazil today only the left is allowed to discuss anything, the hypotheses in dispute are: 1st, Central Station is a film as leftist as any other worthy of that name; 2nd, it is not as leftist a film as one would wish, as it seems to exhaust itself in sentimental humanitarianism with no specific political appeal.

I allow myself to intervene in this debate, albeit a bit late, and declare, to general scandal and perhaps to the complete damnation of Walter Salles in the future socialist Brazil, that it is a film with a markedly conservative ideology; that in this lies its originality in the panorama of Brazilian cinema; and that all its defects come from its director having tried to realize it with the narrative means available created by two generations of leftist filmmakers, resulting in some misconceptions and hesitations in a work that still possesses that singular direct eloquence that is one of the hallmarks of sincerity.

To make this idea more understandable, it is necessary to remember that in Brazil today there are only, strictly speaking, two political currents: the social-democrats who are in government, the communists who are in opposition. The few liberals that remain only survive thanks to a degrading alliance with the social democrats, to whom they have become servants. There is no conservative party and, in the sphere of culture, any conservative idea is a priori banned as a criminal thing – this not only by tacit agreement but by the ostentive and increasingly overbearing action of self-appointed censorship committees.

In the field of education and moral values, social-democrats uphold a discourse identical to that of communists, but, as they follow, in high lines, the IMF’s economic policy, more out of lack of imagination than conviction, they were designated by the leftist media for the role of ad hoc right, which makes the government, the more it gives in to communist pressure outside economic issues, the more it is accused of being right-wing and even fascist because of the treatment it gives to these issues. A social-democratic government, liberal on the face and reluctantly, poses as the only possible right in current Brazil and becomes the target of a condemnatory discourse identical, in everything and for everything, to that directed in the sixties against the military right, from which it ends up being, for all purposes of media image, perfectly indistinguishable.

I am well aware that this situation has a touch of madness, that in it no idea or word corresponds exactly to the things they designate and that, in the end, all Brazilian political discourse resembles that of an actor who intended to represent Hamlet with the lines of Othello. But that the situation is this, it is. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the intellectuals, facing the international success of a Brazilian conservative film – a hypothesis so scandalous that it becomes unthinkable –, end up being prevented, by a scotoma, from seeing what it is about and, discussing it in the usual terms with which leftist autism discusses its intestinal divergences, end up not understanding anything at all.

In general, the movie has been interpreted almost in the sense of a Bildungsroman, the story of the education – and transformation – of the character Dora through the unfolding of lived experiences. As Dora becomes aware of the suffering of the poor, but fails to grasp any political significance in the oppression surrounding her, and everything is ultimately resolved in the realm of pure compassion, the film is diagnosed as having a real political consciousness, yes, but one that is still immature and feeble. The discussion, therefore, exhausts itself in the quantitative question of whether the work is leftist enough to be considered decent. Some say yes, some say no. If there is one thing justly distributed in this world, it is idiocy.

The fact is that, from this perspective, nothing is truly seen, and all that is achieved is to push the discussion further away from its object as it approaches the stereotyped ideological options that summarize it. For the transformation of Dora is too superficial to constitute, on its own, the core of the story. Dora is neither so wicked in the beginning nor becomes so virtuous in the end.

This transformation cannot be the essence of the plot for a very simple reason: the decisive change happens right at the beginning when the exploitative fraudster makes a moral decision for the first time in her life, risking everything to save a boy she barely knew. Throughout the rest of the story, she doesn’t undergo any other profound awakenings but only a progressive and passive adaptation to the new circumstances of her existence, the unavoidable outcomes of her initial choice. If we notice that, during the narrative, she goes from being a modest but stable lower-middle-class spinster (by Brazilian standards) to a wandering and miserable unemployed woman, we will see that her external situation changes much more than her ideas and feelings.

No, Dora’s soul is not the core of the plot, and her transformation is not the essence of the story. Essential is the change in the objective, social, and personal condition of the boy Josué as the unfolding of events takes him away from the big coastal city and leads him back to his roots in the heart of Brazil, where he regains the human condition that urban cruelty had denied him.

What transforms is not the souls of the individual characters: it is the social and moral condition that surrounds them, which changes along with the landscape as the camera follows them from the periphery to the center.

The big city emerges as the setting of evil, a condemned world where the pursuit of money leads to extremes of cruelty and misery is the penultimate stage of a downward journey into nothingness. It is modern Brazil, indeed, but a stupid, inhuman, and hopeless modernity. As they move towards the interior, Josué finds an old, primitive Brazil, yet full of humanity and promises for the future. In the big city, his brothers Moisés and Isaías would have been lost in the whirlpool of banditry, ending up shot on the streets. In the hinterland, they manage to hold their heads high and achieve the beginnings of a decent life.

The progressive and dynamic Brazil of the big city is the vast cemetery of human hopes. The archaic and rough Brazil of the hinterland is the untouched repository of popular virtues and that simple, devout religiosity that, at a certain point in history, produces miracles and flourishes in a bouquet of hopeful smiles – one of the most beautiful moments in Walter Salles' film.

The city of the devil and the hinterland of God – there is no avoiding the parallel with the great classic of conservatism in Portuguese-language literature, the novel A cidade e as serras by J. M. Eça de Queirós. Just like the wealthy Jacinto in the novel, the poor boy and the impoverished spinster in Central do Brasil undertake a journey towards the center, which, if it doesn’t take them to heaven, at least brings them back from hell to a normal and healthy world where smiles can still shine.

Perhaps it is not entirely irrelevant to remember that the title of the film – Central do Brasil – is the name of a railway that, now reduced to transporting cargo and connecting to the suburbs, used to be the main means of transportation for the poor population between the big cities and the heart of the country, between the new Brazil and the old Brazil. Retracing the route of the old railway by road, Dora and Josué discover, in a way, that the order of factors is now reversed: the “new” Brazil is a hopeless hell; the “old” Brazil is a new world being born. Nothing more is needed to demonstrate this than the eloquence of a plot that takes the two heroes from a compressive hell where children are sold to harvest their organs, to an archaic setting where people have biblical names and make a living through the evangelical trade of carpentry; from the brutality of urban life to an archaic world where the sap of life flows from traditional values: family, religion, humility, and work.

On the journey back, the encounter with the truck driver precisely marks the midpoint. This character still has one foot in the old Brazil, due to his attachment to those values, but he also participates in modernity, as he has received them, slightly altered, through the lens of new evangelical sects imported from the US. He can take Josué and Dora to a certain point – but, cautiously, he retreats in fear at the prospect of a profound commitment. If he married Dora, they would constitute a modern semblance of a family, piecing together fragments of dispersed families. It would be a politically correct “happy end” suitable for Globo’s soap operas. In Central do Brasil, this won’t do. Goodbye, superficiality: it is necessary to go deeper, to rediscover the original family, the ancient religion, the authentic roots. Between “the world” and “the soul,” in the biblical sense of the terms, no compromise is possible.

If this is not conservatism, I don’t know what it is. But as the hypothesis that conservatism may have some merit is now a heinous crime, everyone refrains from committing it and has to dig into the progressive imaginary to find the most elaborate excuses to justify an applause whose outright denial would be seen as unpatriotic, a tremendous embarrassment for people who monopolize patriotism. Communists suffer, don’t they?

In recent years, the more or less artificial radicalization of political hatred has led the national public opinion to lose sight of the basic assumption of democratic order: the principle that our political adversaries are not monsters or embodiments of evil, but just people who believe they can achieve good through a different path than ours. To reclaim for conservatives and antimodernists the right to a human face is now an act that requires courage, greatness, and generosity. Central do Brasil restores to our consciousness, numbed by dominant monological discourse, a foundation of ancient values without which all social change is lost – as another great conservative artist, the poet Manuel Bandeira, summarized: lost in “a fierce and purposeless agitation.”

March 3, 1999.

Credits

Symbolic Dialectics: Collected Studies Olavo de Carvalho 2nd edition – November 2015

Editorial Management Diogo Chiuso

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CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Carvalho, Olavo de Symbolic Dialectics: Collected Studies [electronic resource] / Olavo de Carvalho – Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2015.

eISBN: 978-85-67394-80-0

  1. Modern philosophy: essays I. Author II. Title.

CDD – 190.2

SYSTEMATIC CATALOG INDICES

  1. Modern philosophy: essays – 190.2

About the Author

Olavo de Carvalho has been hailed by critics as one of the most original and daring Brazilian thinkers. Men of such different intellectual orientations as Jorge Amado, Roberto Campos, J. O. de Meira Penna, Bruno Tolentino, and Herberto Sales have already expressed their admiration for him and his work. The keynote of his work is the defense of human inwardness against the tyranny of collective authority, especially when bolstered by a “scientific” ideology. For him, there is an indissoluble link between the objectivity of knowledge and the autonomy of individual consciousness, a link that is lost when the criterion of validity of knowledge is reduced to an impersonal and uniform form for academic class use. Believing that the most solid shelter of individual consciousness against alienation and reification is found in ancient spiritual traditions – Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam – Olavo seeks to give a new interpretation to the symbols and rites of these traditions, making them the matrices of a philosophical and scientific strategy for solving current cultural problems.

  1. Reasons that were expounded in more detail in História essencial da filosofia.↩

  2. The poet Bruno Tolentino, who is a very discerning reader, quickly perceived the strategic importance of this short text in the context of my work, as he pointed out in the preface to O Jardim das Aflições.↩

  3. Indeed, founded on the structural homology between the human psyche and the celestial sphere, as we will see.↩

  4. René Guénon, Symboles de la science sacrée, in “Coeur et cerveau” (Paris, Gallimard, 1962, pp. 395-405, chap. LXX).↩

  5. Note from my Philosophical Diary dated December 3, 1991: From a logical point of view, the negation of a negation is an affirmation: “A is equal to A” is the same as “A is not non-A.” Psychologically, the refusal of the negation of something is not the same as its affirmation, and it may even be the opposite: the revolt against the frustration of a desire does not satisfy that desire but even increases the frustration; because desires can only be satisfied by positive gratification. Logically, every negation is the affirmation of an opposite, but psychologically, there are many types of negation, some contradictory to each other. Thus, there is a psychological – logically “impure” – element in dialectic.↩

  6. Something quite similar to the sequence of transitions from plane to plane that I am offering can be found in Philippe D’Arcy’s book La Réflexion, Paris, P.U.F. The four stages we have shown correspond approximately and respectively to what he calls: 1st, stage of the object; 2nd, stage of the subject; 3rd, stage of the Transcendental Ego; 4th, stage of the Sun or stage of the luminous medium; these correspond to the four types of reasoning – identity, cause and effect, analogy, convenience – indicated by Eugène Caslant in Les Bases élementaires de l’Astrologie (Paris, Éditions Traditionelles, 1976, vol. I, chap. II, pp. 21-22).↩

  7. Henri Bergson, Introduction à la Métaphysique, in Œuvres (Paris, P.U.F., 1970, pp. 1392 ss).↩

  8. Gaston Bachelard, Le Nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris, P.U.F).↩

  9. Such as Bertrand Russel in his História da filosofia ocidental (Brazilian translation, São Paulo, Nacional, t. III).↩

  10. Passing from geometric symbolism to logical language: when they are species of the same genus.↩

  11. Logically speaking, the continuity of the observer’s point of view consists in the fact that the two poles of opposition are two predicates of the same category: two quantities (negative and positive, for example), two qualities, two actions, etc.↩

  12. Or, the same thing: Hegelian.↩

  13. The question of the differences between a geocentric symbolism and a heliocentric symbolism will be addressed later.↩

  14. Translator’s note: Olavo was citing the Latin word “ratio” and comparing it to the Portuguese word “razão”, or “reason”. Portuguese lacks the word “ratio” which, in English, plainly has the meaning of numerical proportion.↩

  15. I am referring exclusively to so-called analogies of intrinsic attribution and not to extrinsic attributions or metaphors, which may be based on accidental similarities.↩

  16. For example, Susanne K. Langer, An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (New York, Dover, 1967, p. 21 ss).↩

  17. For example, Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace.↩

  18. V. A. J. Festugière, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, I, L’Astrologie et les sciences occultes (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1989).↩

  19. “Harmonics” are angles of 120º and 60º; “inharmonics” are angles of 180º and 90º; this distinction is based on the remote meanings of “malefic” and “benefic” associated with the numbers 2 (= opposition) and 3 (= complementation) – an archaic symbolism that reappears both in the everyday language of contemporary man’s dreams (see Ludwig Paneth, La Symbolique des nombres dans l’inconscient, trans. Henriette Roguin, Paris, Payot, 1976) and, surprisingly enough, in the very structure of Hegel’s dialectic structure.↩

  20. Rodolfo Hinostroza, El sistema astrológico (Madrid, Alianza Editorial).↩

  21. Logical, ontological, or metaphysical principle, to be understood.↩

  22. V. Edgar de Bruyne, Studies of Medieval Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 216.↩

  23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 32-59).↩

  24. The Universal Man is the prototype of humanity, the model according to which, according to all spiritual traditions, the universe is structured. In Christianity, it is both the old Adam and the “new Adam,” Jesus Christ. See, for example, René Guénon, The Symbolism of the Cross, Paris, Véga, and, from the perspective of exclusively Islamic doctrines, 'Abd al-Karim al-Jili, The Universal Man, trans. and comments by Titus Burckhardt, Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1975.↩

  25. See De Bruyne (op. et loc. cit).↩

  26. Id., ibid.↩

  27. On the imaginal world, see Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (trans. by Willard Trask, Irving, Texas, Spring Publications, 1980).↩

  28. F. W. Schelling, Aphorisms on an Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, numbers 38-40 (S. W., VII: 147-148, repr. in Metaphysical Works, trans. Jean-François Courtine and Emmanuel Martineau, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, pp. 29-30 ).↩

  29. Lecture on July 2, 1996, from the Philosophy Seminar.↩

  30. Moreover, it matters little whether the subject of the experience interprets it as God’s speech, the voice of the world, or the free creation of his own subjectivity. This distinction does not coincide with the boundaries of art, science, philosophy, etc., and only indicates individual differences in temperament, convictions, etc., which do not interfere with the present analysis.↩

  31. Frag. 153 (Synesius, Dio 48 A).↩

  32. Internal or external, it doesn’t matter.↩

  33. It is an autonomous discipline, still in its infancy, whose pioneers, still very poorly understood and assimilated to the present day, are Fabre d’Olivet, Hœne Wronsky, René Guénon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Eric Voegelin.↩

  34. Cf. for example, Modesto de Abreu, Estilo e Personalidade de Euclides da Cunha (Rio: Civilização Brasileira, 1963, esp. p. 148-152).↩

  35. Belo Horizonte: Bernardo Álvares Editor, 1970.↩

  36. In Brazil, this is the norm.↩

  37. Or visual and auditory forms, etc., since what I say applies, mutatis mutandis, to all arts.↩

  38. Current, understand, in a given social environment, which can be more literate or less.↩

  39. Noetic content that already is, certainly, form. We must distinguish, in the work, only the inner form, which is that of the noetic content, and the concrete form, result of the process that Croce called “extrinsication”, process that goes through the more or less happy adequacy between the inner form and the external demands.↩

  40. Concrete form, be it verbal or musical, be it pictorial or architectural – because these considerations apply, mutatis mutandi, to the arts in general.↩

  41. This is clearly the reader’s experience, the listener’s, with all its immediate and sensitive impact, that creates the optical illusion generating the common misperception that I mentioned at the beginning, and which consists, in summary, in a confusion between the experience of receiving poetry and the work of creating it.↩

  42. It is precisely this closed and conclusive character of the work, of the text, that creates for the inattentive analyst the illusion and autonomy of the aesthetic. It is not the aesthetic dimension that is independent of the ethical and ontological dimension, but only the work – with its aesthetic, ethical and ontological dimensions all together – that is independent, to have value, of the ethical or political behavior of the artist. Indeed, it is in the work that he puts the best of himself; and the work is not real life, but rather, by definition, imaginary life; the poet does not put in the work the ethics that he actually follows in real life, but rather the one he would like to follow, that he would follow, if he could, in the imaginary world that mythically and legendarily condenses his ideal. And the tragedy of the artist is that the demand for formal perfection, of the finished and irreproachable work, makes it a closed world separate from life.↩

  43. The concept, after all, is nothing but the full possession of the intuited eidetic content and its record, which allows the repetition of the intuitive act in front of the same essence.↩

  44. Made explicit, that is, in consciousness, and not necessarily in the verbal form of its public expression.↩

  45. “Despite his contradictions and self-torments, despite the yeses and no’s pronounced about the same question, Nietzsche maintained the strictest coherence between what he said and the particularized moments of his spiritual evolution. This coherence compels the researcher, in his analysis, to avoid dissociating, for a second, what Nietzsche expressed from the special moment in which the expression arose”. So says Mário Vieira de Mello in his otherwise beautiful Nietzsche: Socrates of our times (São Paulo, Edusp, 1993 – my italics), apparently without taking from this the most inescapable consequence: that the coherence between an idea and a moment is psychological coherence, not intellectual, if the various mutations cannot be reduced, by the interpretation of successive contexts, to the unity of a system, to coherence with the whole and not just with the moments.

    Now, this logical and not psychological unity, once found, would be perfectly expressible in concept and would dispense, from that moment on, the biographical exegesis; and it is precisely what is missing in Nietzsche. And if Nietzsche himself advocates the reduction of philosophical exegesis to psychological and biographical understanding, it is not because this reduction is a good and indispensable method for understanding all other philosophers, but because it is the only profitable one for his own case, precisely because there is a lack, in his work, of the higher unity of philosophical conception, which, abundant in a Thomas Aquinas or a Leibniz, allows us to use their biographies only as occasional aids and means of verifying details, and not as privileged repositories of a secret key that their texts avoid giving us by themselves.

    Philosophizing poet, unable to overcome the fragmentary symbolic pre-visions and absorb them into the unity of a self-conscious conceptual whole, it is not surprising that Nietzsche, in an inversion that resentment explains, tried to squeeze the authentic philosophers into the mold of his own forma mentis, establishing as the supreme method the reduction of the spiritual to the psychological.

    It is true that the essence of a philosophy is never only in a set of explicit theses; that the philosopheme includes as an essential component a certain inner movement – a characteristic démarche, said Ferdinand Alquié (see The Meaning of Philosophy, chap. I) -, which sometimes the reader does not capture well in the texts or which the philosopher, due to bad literature, did not fix well in the texts, and that knowledge of his biography helps to bring it to light. But the knowledge of this démarche only aims to clarify and enrich the meaning of explicit theses, and not to replace them or to give them a univocity that they do not have by themselves, which is precisely what the biographer and the psychologist hope to do in the case of Nietzsche. For it is not possible that there is a more defined eidetic form in the inner movements of a psyche conjectured from afar by a researcher than in the printed characters of a published work.

    Furthermore, when Nietzsche, swept up in the impulse to unmask the love of truth, suggests that perhaps it is one and the same thing with the love of falsehood, and announces that this problem can only be approached by a new type of philosophers – whom he names “philosophers of perhaps” and of whom he names himself the precursor (Beyond Good and Evil, I, §2) -, what is he doing if not identifying his metaphysics again as “an artist’s metaphysics” (Birth of Tragedy, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”, §2)? For it is proper to art, poetry, symbol, to remain in the perhaps and never to reach the definitively (I have already explained myself about this; see Aristotle in New Perspective, I). It just happens that there are several reasons that impel a man to approach a theme poetically instead of philosophically, and only one of them is legitimate and suitable: it is when this theme cannot be approached philosophically, because it is obscure, because it is new, because we do not yet have of it even that first imaginative outline that is a prerequisite for philosophical reflection and that only art, precisely, can give us. But often poetry is just a temptation to retroactively give a mysterious and oracular air to things already known and dominated by reflection, or then to purposely jumble up the data to give an air of authentic symbol to what is only a false concept.

    I don’t know if this is the case with Nietzsche, and probably I will never know, because, I confess, I can only interest myself superficially in his writings, precisely because they contain an excessive amount of “maybes”; an amount enough to keep us busy with idle questions while we cowardly, lazily, shirk the responsibility of what we already know for sure.↩

  46. “Philosophy is a vision of the world in terms of intelligibility and is the foundation of the possibility of experience. It is, therefore, by its nature, a spiritual synthesis of experience, an ideal composition and deduction of the same, an intuition of the intimate nature of things and relationships, that is, of their ideal birth from the active virtue of the spirit, an illumination impressed and derived on the products of the self-awareness of the producing spirit, a return of the spirit to its productive interiority” (Igino Petrone, Il Diritto nel Mondo dello Spirito. Saggio Filosofico, Milano, Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1910, p.3).↩

  47. Cf. Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Pythagoras and the Theme of Number (2nd ed., São Paulo, Matese, 1965, pp. 67-105).

    The issue of literary genres has been in discussion for centuries. It is one of the most important in Literature Theory. Without narrating the historical evolution of the debate, we will present a summary of the problem and the solutions we offer.

    If these solutions seem scandalously new to scholars in the field, we assure that we had no intention of novelty. We have limited ourselves to applying, to the study of an old question, the principles of an ontology that is as old as the world.↩

  48. Benedetto Croce, Estetica come Scienza dell’Espressione e Linguistica Generale (11th edition, Bari, Laterza, 1965, I:IV, pp. 40-44).↩

  49. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (3rd. ed. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956, pp. 226-227).↩

  50. Massaud Moisés, A criação Literária. Introdução à Problemática da Literatura, 5th ed. São Paulo, Melhoramentos, 1973, p.37.↩

  51. Emil Staiger, Conceptos Fundamentales de Poética, Spanish translation, Madrid, Rialp, 1966, p. 213, cited in Moisés, p. 37.↩

  52. On the notion of “schemes of possibilities”, see Mário Ferreira dos Santos, A Sabedoria dos Princípios, São Paulo, Matese, 1968.↩

  53. Carlos Bousoño notes: “Each sentence that the author conceives as definitive gives the poetic movement an irrevocable direction, which, naturally, excludes, by its mere existence, many other possibilities at that moment, from which different impulses, now inaccessible, could have been born. The poem in its development increasingly orders the general scheme of its unfolding, and the poet only does is particularize this scheme, choose a card from the deck, increasingly less thick, that is offered to him” (Teoria de la Expresión Poética, 4th ed., Madrid, Gredos, 1966, p. 31-32).↩

  54. Both the purism of genres and the intelligent combination of different genres can equally give good results. The two greatest literary works of the Portuguese Renaissance – Castro, by Antônio Ferreira and Os Lusíadas, by Camões – respectively follow these two strategies. Ferreira wanted to carry out a tragedy that adhered as closely as possible to the Aristotelian rule, and with this he obtained the tremendous dramatic concentration that makes his play one of the most impactful works in the Portuguese language. Camões, on the other hand, being unable, due to the nature of the chosen historical subject, to strictly follow the model of the mythical epic (Homeric), articulated the mythical narrative with the historical chronicle, producing a work in two parallel strata, which has no equivalent in world literature. On Os Lusíadas as an “impure epic”, see Antônio José Saraiva, “Os Lusíadas and the ideal of the epic”, in Para a História da Cultura em Portugal (5th ed. Lisbon, Bertrand, Vol.I, p. 81 ff).↩

  55. See our “Introduction to the concept of traditional sciences”, in Astrology and Religion (São Paulo, Nova Stella, 1987, chap. IV, p. 53: “Traditional sciences are the body of methods and knowledge that, in all known civilizations – including the Western one until the 14th century –, unfold in a coherent manner in all directions, based on a central core of metaphysical principles, and which are intended to reveal, under all orders of more or less contingent realities, the eternal and unchanging validity of these same principles”.↩

  56. On the distinction between “infinite” and “mathematical infinite”, or “undefined”, see René Guénon, Les Principes du Calcul Infinitésimal (Paris, Gallimard, 1946, chap. 1). The distinction was also highlighted by Descartes, in the 27th of the Principles of Philosophy.↩

  57. For an exposition of Unity, from the logical and ontological point of view, see Mário Ferreira dos Santos, A sabedoria da unidade (São Paulo, Matese, 1968); from the point of view of mystical and sapiential doctrines, see Titus Burckhardt, An Introduction to Sufi Doctrines (English translation, Wellingborough, Thorsons, 1976, Chap. VII).↩

  58. On the concepts of essential continuity and existential discontinuity, see Frithjof Schuon, Forme et Substance dans les Réligions (Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1975, pp. 53-86).↩

  59. The traditional astronomical and astrological symbolism is the integral representation of the coexistence of these three conditions. See Titus Burckhardt, Clef Spirituelle de l’Astrologie Mussulmane (Milano, Arché, 1978), and also our work “Natural astrology and spiritual astrology,” in Astrology and Religion (op. cit., Chap. II).↩

  60. Cf. Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi. Expressions of the Mystic Quest (London, Thames & Hudson, 1979, pp. 10-11); and René Guénon, Symboles de la Science Sacrée (Paris, Gallimard, 1962, Chap. VIII-XIII).↩

  61. René Guénon, Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris, Gallimard, 1945, chap. XXX),↩

  62. The exclusively semantic distinction is defended by Massaud Moisés (op. cit., cap. IV).↩

  63. See our work “Questions of geometric symbolism”, in Astrology and Religion (op. cit., chap. V), and above all the study by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on zero, cit. later. See also Wassily Kandinsky, Point-Ligne-Plan. Contribution à l’Analyse des Élements Picturaux, which, very appropriately, defines the geometric point as “the last and only union of silence and speech” (Paris Denoël, 1970, p. 33).↩

  64. On the analogy, see our work “The Symbolic Dialectic”, in this same edition.↩

  65. Jamil Sáfady, The Arabic Language (São Paulo, Sáfady, 1950, p. 120). See also, on this point, Louis Gardet, “Muslim conceptions of time and history”, in Paul Ricoeur et al., Cultures and Time (Brazilian translation, Petrópolis, Voices, p. 229-262, esp. p. 232). For an explanation of Greek tenses, see: Guida Nedda Barata Parreira Horta, The Greeks and their Language (Rio de Janeiro, di Giorgio, 1983, vol. I, p. 152-153). Aorist literally means “undefined”, “undetermined”. It comes from orisma, which means “limit”, “border”, “term” and “definition”, from which also come our words “hour” and “horizon”. The study of Greek myths linked to the horizon as the limit between Heaven and Earth shows the inseparable link between the verbal time “unending” – aorist – and the “everlasting” time of mythology (cf. Eudoro de Souza, Horizon and Complementarity, São Paulo, Duas Cidades, 1978).↩

  66. On the “triple time”, see Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity (French translation, Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1976), esp. the appendix: “Kha and other words meaning ‘zero’ in their relation to the metaphysics of space”, p. 117 et seq.; and René Guénon, The Great Triad (Paris, Gallimard, 1957, chap. XXII). On the restoration of possibilities, see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return. Archetypes and Repetition (Paris, Gallimard, 1969, Chaps. I and II). On the mundus imaginalis and its inhabitants – perfectly real -, see Henry Corbin, In Iranian Islam. Spiritual and Philosophical Aspects (Paris, Gallimard, 1971, vol. I, pp. 167-185).↩

  67. It is therefore obvious that cinematic narrative is included in the “unfinished symbolic narrative” subspecies.↩

  68. It is also obvious that novels and stories written in the present tense are inspired by a technique that ultimately is cinematographic; and that, as in them the present tense of the verbs does not give real actuality to the events that are in fact only being narrated and not shown, the supposed “present tense” is metaphorical, not real as in theater. But, in a certain way, the “present tense” of cinema is also metaphorical, since the actors are not really acting at the moment when the viewer watches the film.↩

  69. We did not see any need to delve into the essence of each genre in particular, as this is not the purpose of our work; we only want to show the ontological foundation of the idea of genres itself. It might be interesting for the reader to compare our scheme with that of Northrop Frye, (Anatomy of Criticism, Brazilian translation, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1983, cap. IV), whose angle of approach is completely different from ours, but not opposed.↩

  70. See note 63.↩

  71. June 2, 1991.↩

  72. Faust I, trans. Jenny Klabin Segall.↩

  73. Withall N. Perry, Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition (London, Perennial Books, 1984).↩

  74. Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1981, Chap. 7).↩

  75. See Olavo de Carvalho, Astros e Símbolos, São Paulo, Nova Stella, 1985.↩

  76. See Dante, Il Convito, treatise II, Chap. XIII; Titus Burckhardt, Principes et Methodes de l’Art Sacré (Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1982). Also, on literary genres: The literary genres: their metaphysical foundations, in this same edition. On the principles of symbolism, see René Alleau, La Science des Symboles. Contribuition à l’Étude des Principes et des Méthodes de la Symbolique Générale (Paris, Payot, 1977).↩

  77. Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (trans. Antonio Gonçalves Penna, 2nd ed., Rio de Janeiro, Record, 1991).↩

  78. See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York, Mentor Book, 1952 – esp. Chap. 3).↩

  79. New York, Alliance Book, 1939.↩

  80. London, Macmillan, 1947.↩

  81. Paris, Vrin, 1985.↩

  82. The title – do I need to say? – is inspired by the blatant similarity between the theme of the play by John Pielmeyer, the subject of my analysis, and the novel by Eça de Queirós, which the Canadian author most likely did not read. I have never understood as anything other than futile snooping the curiosity some people have about the sex lives of priests and nuns. The assumption of tremendous orgies behind the walls of a convent excites them enormously, more so than if the partying were to take place in a motel. I doubt that this unhealthy curiosity of teenagers can ever generate any superior production in any art. Those who indulge in this kind of speculation have not yet lived long enough to realize that the sex life of most human beings is poor and charmless, and that only by a frankly perverse exception could the vow of chastity make it more interesting.↩

  83. See “The literary genres: their metaphysical foundations”, in this same edition.↩

  84. The sporadic objection that sincere Christians also have doubts is entirely irrelevant. Faith does not exclude moments or even phases of doubt: it only excludes outright denial and the spirit of contradiction that takes doubt beyond the limit of a natural requirement for explanations.↩

  85. The appearance of the stigmata of Christ—the marks of the nails with which he was fastened to the cross—on the palms of a believer is generally considered, in the Christian tradition, a reliable sign of divine predilection, at least when accompanied by manifest spiritual gifts, such as excellent moral virtues, inspired speech, and the ability to perform miraculous healings. A well-known worldwide case is that of Padre Pio in Italy.↩

  86. By attributing, as is generally done, to the word “faith” the sense of “belief” – giving it the connotation of a simple emotional inclination to support something that cannot be proven and turning it, therefore, into a kind of wishful thinking – what is too often forgotten is the connection, and more than a connection, an identity, between this word and the terms “faithful” and “fidelity” through the common Latin root fides. One can only be faithful to something or someone, to a law, to a commitment, to a lord; if this lord were radically unknown, how would we know if our acts, or even intentions, are faithful or not to him? How to obey a coded order? How to be faithful to an ambiguous oath? Faith, or fidelity, presupposes knowledge of what one is being faithful to: a mere “desire to believe,” like Mother Miriam’s, is conditional fidelity and, therefore, is not faith at all. Faith is fidelity, constancy, obedience to a calling, to an inner call, but for this, this calling must have already erupted, this call must have already been uttered. Faith consists in not forgetting it, even when the passing conditions of the phenomenal world seem to deny it; and this is the meaning of St. Augustine’s credo quia absurdum, a phrase that is often used, however, by the enemies of religion to brand it as anti-rational. Logically, fidelity renews and revitalizes our knowledge of this calling, and this knowledge in turn justifies and strengthens fidelity: Crede ut intelligas, intellige ut credas – “Believe so that you may understand; understand so that you may believe.” The confusion between faith and wishful thinking is perhaps one of the bitterest fruits of the “Christian” sentimentalism of our day.↩

  87. Regarding the symbolism of temples, in addition to the classic and definitive works of René Guénon (Le symbolisme de la croix, 1931; Symboles de la science sacrée, 1962, posthumous work), one can read Jean Hani, O simbolismo do templo cristão (Portuguese translation, Lisbon, Edições 70, 1981).↩

  88. On the principles of sacred and traditional art, see Titus Burckhardt, Principes et méthodes de l’art sacrée (Paris, Dervy, 1976), and Frithjof Schuon, Castes et races suivi de principes et critères de l’art universel (Milano, Archè, 1979).↩

  89. “The man whom psychology deals with is still merely an external man. The psychic element is not the mystical element. The inner man will be spiritual, not psychic” (Nicholas Berdiaev, Le sens de la création: un éssai de justification de l’homme, Paris, p. 376). On the confusion between psychism and spirituality or, in other terms, between “imaginary” and “imaginal”, see also René Guénon, Le règne de la quantité et les signes de temps (Paris, Gallimard, 1945, ch. 34 and 35), as well as Henri Corbin, Corps spirituel et terre céleste (Paris, Cuchet-Chastel, 2nd ed., 1979, p. 20-26).↩

  90. The symbolism of the mountain illustrates the contrast between an “ascending” or “unifying” tendency and a “descending” or “multiplying” tendency. In fact, the peak of the mountain consists of a single inextensive point; the base, on the contrary, is the part where the largest amount of matter accumulates; the peak is, therefore, “one” and “rarefied”; the base, “multiple” and “compressive”. This illustrates the differentiation between essence and substance (form and matter, in scholastic terms). See René Guénon, Le règne de la quantitè (op. cit., chap. I).↩

  91. Faced with such a large distortion of Christianity, like the one we see in this play, which is clearly influenced by the degeneration of post-conciliar aggiornamento and by the spurious mixtures between religion and modern psychology, we cannot fail to remember the observation of Pope Paul VI, when he said that only the overwhelming influence of an intentional and “non-human” force could explain the deviation that the original proposal of the Second Vatican Council came to suffer. It is a papal statement that echoes the words of René Guénon about “counter-initiation” as a very specific and intentional force, and not as a vague sociocultural “atmosphere”. Or, to say it as Norman Mailer: “I propose that the existence of the devil be accepted as a scientific hypothesis”.↩

  92. It was only the loss of the true concept of symbolism that led the modern mind to have to choose between “history” and “myth”, unable to understand that historical facts are essentially symbols, without this taking away anything from their historicity, and that, on the contrary, it is their symbolic character that is the foundation of this historicity itself. See Henry Corbin (En Islam iranien, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, vol. I, prologue).↩

  93. Rereading this passage, I notice that it is elliptical and obscure, taking for granted the foundations of the argument, certainly because the book was intended for students, who would have already heard them in class. The reader of the present edition will find a brief exposition of these foundations in the Appendix of this study.↩

  94. On the notion of “universal possibility”, see Guénon, Les États multiples de l’Être (Paris, Vega, 1980, pp. 13-18).↩

  95. See H.-G. Gadamer, Theory, technique, practice – The task of a new Anthropology, in H.-G. Gadamer and P. Vogler (org.), New Anthropology (vol. I, Biological Anthropology, First Part, trans. Egon Schaden et al., São Paulo, E.P.U./Edusp, 1977, p. 3-12). On this point, see also my book The Collective Imbecile – Current Brazilian Incultures.↩

  96. Wisdom and Illusions of Philosophy (trans. Zilda Abujamra Deir, São Paulo, Abril, 1983, Col. “The Thinkers”, p. 83).↩

  97. See later item V of this Appendix.↩

  98. Transcription of the January 30, 1997 class from the Philosophy Seminar made by Marcelo Tomasco Albuquerque and edited by Alessandra Bonrruquer.↩

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