And yet each of these stories had a virtue: as narratives, they seemed plausible, more than everyday or historical reality, which is far more complex and less credible. The stories seemed to explain something that was otherwise hard to understand.
We will take another look at the story of Ptolemy. Today we know that the Ptolemaic hypothesis was scientifically false. And yet, if our knowledge is by now Copernican, our perception is still Ptolemaic: we not only see the sun rise in the east and travel through the arc of the day, but we behave as if the sun turns and we remain immobile. And we say, “the sun rises,” “the sun is high in the sky,” “it sinks,” “it sets.” Even your astronomy professors speak Ptolemaically.
Why should the tale of the Donation of Constantine have been rejected? It guaranteed a continuity of power after the fall of the empire, it perpetuated an idea of Latinity, it indicated a guide, a reference point amid the flames of the massacres perpetrated by the many suitors disputing the nuptial bed of Europa.
Why refuse the story of Cosmas? In other respects he had been an alert traveler, a diligent collector of geographical and historical curiosities, and furthermore his flat-earth theory—at least from a narrative point of view—displayed some verisimilitude: the earth was a great rectangle bounded by four immense walls that supported two layers of heavenly vault; on the first the stars shone and, in the cavity between the two, the inner ceiling, lived the Blest; astronomical phenomena were explained by the presence of a very high mountain to the north that, hiding the sun, created night and, coming between sun and light, produced eclipses.
Why reject the story of the Rosicrucians, when it satisfied an expectation of religious harmony? And why reject the story of the Protocols, if they could explain so many historic events by the myth of the conspiracy? Karl Popper has reminded us that the social theory of conspiracy is like the one we find in Homer. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that everything taking place on the plain before Troy represented only a reflection of the countless conspiracies devised on Olympus. The social theory of conspiracy, Popper says, is a consequence of the end of God as a reference point and of the consequent question, Who is there in his place? This place is now occupied by various men and powerful, sinister groups that can be blamed for having organized the Great Depression and all the evils we suffer.10
Why consider absurd the belief in plots and conspiracies when today they are still used to explain the failure of our own actions or the reason that events have taken a different turn from that desired?
False tales are, first of all, tales, and tales, like myths, are always persuasive. And we could mention many, many other false tales, for example, the myth of the Terra Australis, that immense continent that supposedly extended all along the polar cap and subtropical Antarctica. The firm belief in the existence of this land (affirmed by countless maps showing the globe encircled, to the south, by a broad terrestrial band), drove navigators from various nations for at least three centuries to try to explore the south seas and even the Antarctic.
What can be said of the idea of Eldorado and the fountain of youth, which led mad, brave heroes to explore the two Americas? Or the stimulus given to nascent chemistry by hallucinations inspired by the phantom of the philosopher’s stone? And what about the tale of Phlogiston, the tale of cosmic ether?
Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales produced positive effects, while others produced horror and shame. All created something, for better or worse. Nothing in their success is inexplicable. What represents a problem is rather the way they managed to replace other tales that today we consider true. Some years ago, in an essay of mine on fakes and counterfeits, I concluded that although instruments, whether empirical or conjectural, exist to prove that some object is false, every decision in the matter presupposes the existence of an original, authentic and true, to which the fake is compared. The truly genuine problem thus does not consist of proving something false but in proving that the authentic object is authentic.
And yet this obvious consideration must not lead us to the conclusion that a criterion of truth does not exist and that tales now called false and tales that today we believe true are equivalent because both belong to the genre of narrative fiction. There exists a process of verification that is based on slow, collective, public performance by what Charles Sanders Peirce called “the Community.” It is thanks to human faith in the work of this community that we can say, with some serenity, that the Donation of Constantine was false, that the earth turns around the sun, and that Saint Thomas at least knew the planet is round. At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
Some years ago in France a book by Jean-François Gautier appeared, entitled L’Univers existe-t-il? (Does the universe exist?).11 Good question. What if the universe were a concept like cosmic ether, or phlogiston, or the conspiracy of the Elders of Zion?
Philosophically, Gautier’s arguments make sense. The idea of the universe, as the totality of the cosmos, is one that comes from the most ancient cosmographies, cosmologies, and cosmogonies. But can one describe, as if seeing it from above, something within which we are contained, of which we are part, and from which we cannot exit? Can there be a descriptive geometry of the universe when there is no space outside it on which to project it? Can we talk about the beginning of the universe, when a temporal notion such as “beginning” must refer to the parameter of a clock, while the universe must be the clock of itself and cannot be referred to anything that is external to it? Can we say, as Eddington does, that a hundred billion stars constitute a galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies constitute the universe, when, as Gautier observes, while a galaxy is an observable object, the universe is not, and therefore we would be establishing an improper analogy between two incommensurable objects? Can we postulate the universe and then study with empirical instruments this postulate as if it were an object? Can a singular object exist (surely the most singular of all) that has as its characteristic that of being only a law? And what if the story of the big bang were a tale as fantastic as the gnostic account that insisted the universe was generated by the lapsus of a clumsy demiurge? Basically, this criticism of the notion of the universe reiterates Kant’s criticism of the notion of the world.
At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians.
After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
- A first version was given as a prolusion at the opening of the Academic Year, Bologna, 1994–95.
2 LANGUAGES IN PARADISE
This story starts in the Garden of Eden, where Adam speaks with God, and ends at the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, where Dante Alighieri (Paradise xxvi) meets Adam and speaks with him.
Afterward, language will play a lesser role in Dante’s travels. Even though he still talks with Saint Peter, Beatrice, or Saint Bernard, he is coming closer and closer to the site of the highest angelical hierarchies, and, as everybody knows, angels do not speak because they understand each other through a sort of instantaneous mental reading, and they know everything they are allowed to know (according to their rank) not by any linguistic intercourse but by watching the Divine Mind. At this point, as Dante says in the final canto of the Divine Comedy, language is unable to express what he sees: A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa—high fantasy lost power and here broke off.
Nevertheless, my story has an advantage over many others: it can begin at the very Beginning.
Beréshit, God spoke and said, “Let there be light.” In this way, He created both Heaven and Earth; for, with the utterance of the Divine Word, “there was light” (Genesis 1:3, 4). Thus Creation itself arose through an act of speech; it was only by giving things their names that God created them and gave them an ontological status: “And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. … And God called the firmament Heaven” (1:5, 8). In Genesis 2:16–17, the Lord speaks to man for the first time, putting at his disposal everything in the earthly paradise, commanding him, however, not to eat of the fruit
