The Work
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald Yates and James Irby, was published by New Directions in 1962 and introduced Jorge Luis Borges to the English-reading world. It draws from his three major fiction collections: Ficciones (1944), El Aleph (1949), and Otras inquisiciones (1952). While the title is the editors' creation rather than Borges's own, it accurately captures the book's central preoccupation: the labyrinth - physical, textual, metaphysical - as the image of a universe that is a divine text no finite mind can fully read.
Borges's fictions are typically brief - rarely more than ten pages - and read more like philosophical thought experiments in narrative form than conventional stories. They enact rather than describe their themes: a story about infinite regress is itself infinitely regressive; a story about a library containing all possible books itself contains every possible statement about everything. This self-referential quality is inseparable from Borges's engagement with the Bible as the supreme model of a text that claims to contain all truth.
Biblical Engagement
John 21:25 - 'And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written' - is the Johannine hyperbole that Borges literalizes in 'The Library of Babel.' The library contains all possible books - every combination of the twenty-five symbols of the alphabet in volumes of 410 pages. It therefore contains, scattered through its hexagonal galleries, every truth ever spoken and every lie ever written, the complete history of every life ever lived, and the refutation of every false account. The world is a library; God is the author; the book that contains everything is the book no one can read. Borges inherits John's image and makes it the ground of a theology of divine inscrutability.
Proverbs 8:30 - 'Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him' - presents Wisdom as the companion of God at creation, present before the world was made. Borges's 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' presents a world created by a secret society of scholars - a parody of divine creation by an invisible author. The story engages the Wisdom tradition's conception of creation as an intellectual act, a text composed by a mind that existed before the world.
Revelation 5:1 - 'And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals' - provides the image of the sealed, unreadable divine book that haunts Borges's fictions. In 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' the Chinese scholar Ts'ui Pên creates a novel that is also a labyrinth: not a linear narrative but an infinitely branching structure in which every possibility is realized simultaneously. This is Borges's image of time and of divine omniscience - a God who sees all possible futures simultaneously, as Revelation's God holds the sealed book of all history.
'Three Versions of Judas' presents a fictional theologian, Nils Runeberg, who argues that God's Incarnation required not only becoming a man but becoming a criminal - not Jesus but Judas - in order to take on the full depth of human degradation. The story draws on John 13:27 ('And after the sop Satan entered into him') and the theological tradition from Origen to Dostoevsky that saw Judas as a necessary instrument of redemption, pushing it to its logical extreme in a style that parodies academic theological argument while engaging it seriously.
Author and Context
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires to a family with both Argentine and English roots; he was bilingual from childhood and read his father's library in English before Spanish. The library - literally, his father's library; symbolically, the universe as library - was his formative environment. He read the Bible in the King James Version as a child and retained an intimate knowledge of its cadences and imagery throughout his life, though he described his relationship to religion as that of an agnostic who found religious ideas aesthetically and intellectually compelling rather than spiritually authoritative.
Borges went blind in his mid-fifties, a development that intensified both his engagement with books as objects of memory and imagination and his sense of the gap between the infinite text and the finite reader. He served as director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 to 1973, a position that placed him in charge of a large collection he could no longer read with his own eyes - a situation he described with characteristic irony as God's joke.
Themes
Borges's engagement with the Bible is characteristically metaliterary: the Bible is the supreme text about texts, the book that claims to contain all truth, the model for the relationship between divine author and finite reader. His fictions explore the implications of this claim: if God is the author of a text that contains everything, then everything is simultaneously meaningful and impossible to interpret; the universe is a library that contains its own refutation.
His treatment of theological ideas - Incarnation, predestination, divine omniscience, the nature of evil - is always philosophical rather than devotional, analytical rather than worshipful. He treats the theological tradition as a body of ideas available for fictional and intellectual exploration, not a body of doctrines to be accepted or rejected.
Reception
Labyrinths was immediately recognized in the English-speaking world as a major work of world literature. John Updike and John Barth identified Borges as the originator of the postmodern fiction that would dominate American literature in the 1960s and 1970s. His influence on writers from Umberto Eco to Salman Rushdie, from Thomas Pynchon to Italo Calvino, has been immense.
Legacy
Borges established the model of a secular literary engagement with biblical material that treats the Bible as the supreme metaliterature - a text about the nature of texts, of authorship, of interpretation, of the relationship between the infinite and the finite. His influence on postmodern theology's understanding of scripture as an inexhaustible text has been noted by scholars including Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy.