Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [98]
I told him about my afternoon adventure.
“So now it’s the Rosicrucians as well? Your thirst for knowledge is insatiable, my friend. But pay no attention to those lunatics. They constantly talk about irrefutable documents that no one ever produces. I know that Bramanti. He lives in Milan, but he travels all over the world spreading his gospel. ,A harmless man, though he still believes in Kiesewetter. Hordes of Rosicrucians insist on that page of the Theatrum Chemicum. But if you actually take a look at it—and I might modestly add that I have a copy in my little Milanese library—there is no such quotation.”
“Herr Kiesewetter’s a clown, then.”
“But much quoted. The trouble is that even the nineteenth-century occultists fell victim to the spirit of positivism: a thing is true only if it can be proved. Take the debate on the Corpus Hermeticum. When that document came to light in Europe in the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, and many other people of great wisdom immediately realized that it had to be a work of most ancient wisdom, antedating the Egyptians, antedating even Moses himself. It contained ideas that would later be expressed by Plato and by Jesus.”
“What do you mean, later? That’s the same argument Bramanti used to prove Dante was a Mason. If the Corpus repeats ideas of Plato and Jesus, it must have been written after them!”
“You see? You’re doing it, too. That was exactly the reasoning of modem philologists, who also added wordy linguistic analyses intended to show that the Corpus was written in the second or third century of our era. It’s like saying that Cassandra must have been born after Homer because she predicted the destruction of Troy. The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modem illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause...What does ‘coming before’ mean, or ‘coming after’? Does your beautiful Amparo come before or after her motley ancestors? She is too splendid—if you will allow a dispassionate opinion from a man old enough to be her father. She thus comes before. She is the mysterious origin of whatever went into her creation.”
“But at this point...”
“It is the whole idea of ‘point’ that is mistaken. Ever since Parmenides, points have been posited by science in an attempt to establish whence and whither something moves. But in fact nothing moves, and there is only one point, the one from which all others are generated at the same instant. The occultists of the nineteenth century, like those of our own time, naively tried to prove the truth of a thing by resorting to the methods of scientific falsehood. You must reason not according to the logic of time but according to the logic of Tradition. One time symbolizes all others, and the invisible Temple of the Rosicrucians therefore exists and has always existed, regardless of the current of history—your history. The time of the final revelation is not time by the clock. Its bonds are rooted in the time of ‘subtle history,’ where the befores and afters of science are of scant importance.”
“In other words, those who maintain that the Rosicrucians are eternal—”
“Are scientific fools, because they seek to prove that which must be known without proof. Do you think the worshipers we will see tomorrow night are capable of proving all the things that Kardek told them? Not at all. They simply know, because they are willing to know. If we had all retained this receptivity to secret knowledge, we would be dazzled by revelations. There is no need to wish; it’s enough to be willing.”
“But look—and forgive my banality—do the Rosicrucians exist or not?’’
“What do