In one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, the
titular detective, no doubt echoing the opinion of his creator, describes the
difference between a mystic and a mystagogue, a huckster or sham mystic. “Real
mystics,” he says, “don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up
in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it, it’s still a mystery. But the
mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a
platitude.”
By this definition, Chesterton himself was one of the greatest
mystics of all time. One could perhaps call him the “mystic of common sense,”
for he reveled in revealing the humane paradoxes of the simple Christian view
of life, vocation, and family. Jorge Luis Borges, who was himself greatly
influenced by Chesterton, was a mystic as well. He was a mystic of academia or
scholarship. He revels in the perverse paradoxes that lurk in the labyrinths of
footnotes, the dark and uncertain basements of our sunny and certain essays. He
reveals the fundamental insecurities of scholarship and thereby invites the
reader to a humility that is nothing less than Christian. I say this despite
the fact that Borges was a professed agnostic, for no matter how esoteric or
alien his subject matter, his little essays and stories are all founded on the
soil of the Christian West like a pagoda in an English garden. It is this
rootedness that allows him to be a good mystic, the same rootedness that
shapes, for example, Eco’s fiction.
Many authors today, trying to write the perfect postmodern
story or novel, have become mere mystagogues, trotting out worn clichés and
platitudes and using every means in their power to make them seem mystifying,
to the glory of the author’s intellect. However, Borges seems to hold his
genius lightly, playing with words and ideas like a juggler plays with balls.
He is clearly having a jolly time of it and wants the reader to enter into the
sense of fun; however, this doesn’t detract from the heavy questions posed by
many of his stories. The same keen intellect runs through all these “ficciones”,
but the individual stories themselves are of many kinds. Some of them like “The
Immortal” seem like they could have been written by H.P. Lovecraft; others like
“The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Shape of the Sword” are highly
reminiscent of G.K Chesterton. Some of the stories defy categorization, and
some are not actually stories but merely the outlines of stories yet to be
written.
I believe that Borges’s intent is to leave the reader with a
spinning mind and a sense of awe in light of the story of the world, a story encompassing
billions of characters with varied motivations and actions and infinite
possibilities before them. Borges’s stories are, among many other things, a
call to intellectual humility. As the anonymous narrator of “The Lottery of
Babylon” writes, “I have known what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.”
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