Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

enounced honor, morality, peace and the kingdom of heaven, just as
others, less heroically, renounce pleasure.* With terrible lucidity he
premeditated his sins. In adultery there is usually tenderness and
abnegation; in homicide, courage; in profanity and blasphemy, a
certain satanic luster. Judas chose those sins untouched by any virtue:
violation of trust (John 12:6) and betrayal. He acted with enormous
humility, he believed himself unworthy of being good. Paul has
written:
"He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (I Corinthians
1:31); Judas sought Hell, because the happiness of the Lord was
enough for him. He thought that happiness, like morality, is a divine
attribute and should not be usurped by humans. **
* Borelius inquires mockingly: "Why didn't he renounce his renunciation Or
renounce the idea of renouncing his renunciation"
**
Euclides da Cunha, in a book unknown to Runeberg, notes that for the heresiarch
of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue "was almost an impiety." The Argentine
reader will recall analogous passages in the work of Almafuerte. In the symbolist
sheet Sju insegel, Runeberg published an assiduous descriptive poem, The Secret
Waters; the first stanzas narrate the events of a tumultuous day; the last, the
discovery of a glacial pond; the poet suggests that the permanence of those silent
waters corrects our useless violence and in some way allows and absolves it. The
poem ends as follows: "The waters of the forest are good; we can be evil and suffer."
Many have discovered, post factum, that in Runeberg's
justifiable beginning lies his extravagant end and that Den hemlige
Frälsaren is a mere perversion or exasperation of Kristus och Judas.
Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg completed and corrected the
manuscript text; almost two years went by without his sending it to the
printer. In October 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to
the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and
with this perfidious epigraph: "He was in the world, and the world was
made by him, and the world knew him not" (John 1:10). The general
argument is not complex, though the conclusion is monstrous. God,
argues Nils Runeberg, lowered Himself to become a man for the
redemption of mankind; we may conjecture that His sacrifice was
perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit what
He underwent to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is
blasphemous.* To maintain he was a man and incapable of sin
involves a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of
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