Echo des Etudes Romanes (Dec 2015)
La visión infinita en El Aleph de Jorge Luis Borges y en De visione Dei de Nicolás De Cusa
Abstract
Jorge Luis Borges integrated in his work a large amount of metaphysical challenges, especially his obsession with the concept of infinity which is present in almost all of his texts in the form of bookshelves, deserts, branched roads etc. Infinity is, for this Argentinian writer, a dimension which dissolves the reality or which it transforms into another reality, one of neverending multiplications, reflexions, dreams and illusions. In his emblematic short story El Aleph, the thoughts concerning infinity concentrate on the possibility of a human to achieve a complete understanding of the inconceivable universe; thus this understanding is represented by the metaphor of simultaneous visualisation of all the point of the universe in all the moments interlaced in a small sphere. It is on the basis of these two relative points, the human knowledge on the one hand and its metaphoric representation on the other hand, that we explore the possible correlations between Borges´s approach and the thinking of Nicolas de Cues, a 15th century theologist and philosopher who on the basis of his idea, according to which God is infinite and perfect, considers in his treatise De Visione Dei, the difference between God´s infinite capacity of sight and the limitations of the human vision which is the cause of the human incapacity to achieve complete knowledge.
