Page 13 - GALIET LICENSES AND SILENCES: Burke IV

inculcated by reason as opposed to passion and ecstasy. (In godly ecstasy, the “o” vanishes into everything and appears as nothing).
Should we believe Borges then when he says that “A god must speak but a single word, and in that, there must be absolute plenitude and no less than the universe...”8 or should he speak a plenitude of multiple words, unknown and known to human and inhuman kind?
Is History and hence Liberty an absolute or a multiple imperative? Moral or immoral? Is God prudence or decorum? Burke seems to ascribe all these labels to God. Because Burke has an absolute mind he is unable to perceive that the notion that unity and God preserve the nation are in themselves a fallacy “The unity, peace, tranquility of this nation...does under God wholly depend” (103). Burke as advocator of the Absolute reinforces the limitations of the Absolute: to be “under God” is to be overpowered by him, limited by him. To place him above us is to despair. Moreover, to have God as the center of politics and constitutions is abhorrent. Yet to see the divinity within us is true freedom.
Burke in having a natural and providential vision of history believes then on the principles of a “manly, moral and regulated
8 Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. “The Writing of the God”. NY, USA: The Penguin Group. Viking. 1998
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