Cats
Continued.
“Quos
Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.”
…Having figured out the first part of Woland’s “mumbling,”
we move on to the proofs themselves. Everything is clear with regard to the
seventh proof. Woland surely brought it home in front of our eyes. And what are
we going to do about the proof of Kant? Here we shall need the first name
mentioned by Kot Begemot, Sextus
Empiricus… Bulgakov chose this name for a reason. Sextus means number six.
Empiricus means deriving knowledge from experience.
Sextus Empiricus [160-210 AD] represents Graeco-Roman
skepticism. “Nothing is knowable!”
The skeptics raised concerns against all types of knowledge, including
knowledge of God. What is remarkable here is that by naming Sextus Empiricus
first, whose name, I repeat, refers to number six, Kot Begemot, in Chapter 22,
echoes, kind of mockingly, the words of his Messire, who in chapter 1 asks
Berlioz:
“…So,
what are we going to do about all those proofs of God’s existence, which, as we
know, are precisely five in number?” To
which attack Berlioz offers a resistance: “Well, humanity has long relegated them to the archives… In the field of
reason there can be no proof of God’s existence!”
Berlioz stands with Sextus Empiricus in this, who in
his time tackled the questions of atheism.
But Woland would have none of Berlioz’s grandstanding,
and he catches him here with the help of Kant:
“…You
have just repeated the thought of the old man Kant on this subject. But,
oops!—how curious--- he did indeed destroy all the five proofs, but then, as if
in mockery of himself, he constructed his own sixth proof!”
Now, Woland speaks here of the five proofs of God’s
existence. They are: ontological, teleological, cosmological, logical, and
moral. We can talk of various Christian proponents of these arguments, such as
St. Anselm and many others, but in their basic philosophical (rather than
theological) form they can all be traced to Aristotle, who is the third name
mentioned by Kot Begemot.
On a lighter note, I would like to note that in the With the Candles chapter of Master and Margarita we are dealing not
with just one learned cat, as represented by M. Yu. Lermontov, but with two
learned cats (the other one is Pushkin) and one very intelligent cat, namely,
M. A. Bulgakov, because it is thanks to Bulgakov that Begemot, playing the most
interesting chess game ever described in world literature with the devil, is
openly mocking Woland, while at the same time making fun of his pen comrade A.
S. Pushkin.
And so, it will be with these three really delightful
cats that we are going to conclude this exceptional chapter about Cats.
Bulgakov brilliantly introduces Kot Begemot in a
dialogue with Woland, solving all his puzzles, as Martianus Capella wrote much
of his work in the form of a dialogue, which had to go very agreeably with both
teachers and students, as it made studying fun for all who studied by his book De Nuptiis.
And so, from the “learned cat” V. I. Persikov, the
discoverer of the “beam of life,” we
proceed to the “learned cat” Begemot, reasoning about philosophy and religion
in the romantic chapter With the Candles.
In the course of our first meeting with him, Begemot instructs Messire on the
rules of feline etiquette, not only tremendously amusing Woland, but also
leaving a clue for the curious reader.
Preparing himself for the Ball of the Spring Full Moon,
Begemot “transforms” himself, if we can say so.---
“Now on the cat’s neck there was a white
tuxedo bowtie, and on his chest, mother-of-pearl ladies’ binoculars on a strap.
Besides that, the cat’s whiskers were gilded. [Woland is amused:] Why did you gild your whiskers? And what the devil for do
you need the bowtie, if you do not wear pants? [To which Kot Begemot
quite reasonably replies that:] Each one adorns themselves the way they can… Pants are not
part of a cat’s attire… A cat in boots can be found only in fairytales… A
shaven cat is really an abomination… [He] powdered his whiskers with golden
powder because white powder, which people use, is in no way better than gold
powder.”
In this dialogue Bulgakov himself sends his reader
into a world of fairytale of Perrault’s Puss
in Boots, and finding oneself in this fairytale world, who can fail to
remember the gorgeous portrait of Puss himself by Gustave Dore, where the cat
wears a magnificent plumed hat, boots up to the knees, and most importantly, the
black gauntlet gloves reaching up to the elbows?
In his ability to sprinkle clues around in his works,
Bulgakov is second to none. One must simply be able to recognize and discern
them.
And what about the verbal portrait of Kot Begemot?
Bulgakov’s is not inferior to Dore’s drawn masterpiece. Having played this
tragicomic prelude and relaxed the reader by the seemingly trifle details and
also by throwing at Begemot the accusation that he is just palavering, knowing
that his game position is hopeless, Bulgakov delivers his blow with a ‘chain of tightly packed syllogisms.’ Not
only does the reader fail to appreciate them and treats them like “verbal soiling,” but he also fails to
see that out of a sudden he is dealing with not just one, but two learned cats
at once.
Bulgakov takes the idea of “names” from A. S.
Pushkin’s satirical so-called “Children’s
Book.”
…A. S. Pushkin was not only Bulgakov’s idol, but he
was also his consoler in his moments of despair. [See my comment on Notes on the Cuffs, Segment XX.] Not to
mention the fact that, having written, in 1934, the play Alexander Pushkin, Bulgakov had to do an extensive research on
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, thoroughly rereading his Reminiscences, Diaries, Letters, Articles etc., in other words
everything that this great man had ever written. In my chapter The Bard I will be giving numerous
examples of Pushkin’s influence on Bulgakov.
In his first story of the Children’s Book, titled Lightheaded
Boy, which parodies the well-known personality of Pushkin’s time, namely,
Nikolai Polevoy, editor of the contemporary journal Moscow Telegraph, A. S. Pushkin makes fun of N. Polevoy, a learned
vir who not only has no knowledge of foreign languages, but even neglects basic
Russian grammar. Pushkin depicts Polevoy as a little boy named Alyosha, saying
that “…when the
teacher scolded him for the vocabuls, Alyosha [the light-headed boy] responded
to him with the names of Schelling, Fichte, Cousin, Heeren, Niebuhr and
Schlegel… Well, so what? With all his intelligence and abilities, Alyosha knew
only the first four rules of arithmetic, and he could read fairly fluently in
Russian; he became known as an ignoramus, and all his friends were laughing at
Alyosha.”
Our “clever
Bulgakov” obviously observes how Pushkin mockingly “drops” the names of six
well-known philosophers here, et voilà, Bulgakov does not hesitate to “drop”
the name of Sextus [Empiricus], which, as we know, indicates the number Six.
This name/number, in Bulgakov, can mean two things:
1.
The six proofs of
God’s existence, from Aristotle to Kant;
2.
The question of
atheism, which, as we shall later see, is pertinent to the subject of A. S.
Pushkin. Sextus Empiricus was a skeptic; having in his possession not a single
valid proof of God’s existence, he was toying with the atheist alternative, for
which, to be logical, he had no valid proof, either.
As I said before already, instead of six names,
Bulgakov offers three, who cover both the five proofs of God’s existence
(traced to Aristotle), and the sixth proof, offered by Kant, having demolished
the five proofs stated before him. The three names are that of Aristotle,
Sextus Empiricus, and Martianus Capella. Introducing this third name, Bulgakov
continues, following Pushkin’s lead, to make fun of “Alyosha” and others, such
as, for instance, Berlioz, who, like Nikolai Polevoy, is also editor of a thick
literary journal, suggesting what kind of textbook they ought to have started
their education with, which had once been available to Christian children in
Medieval Europe, showing a certain breadth of the Christian point of view,
which was not afraid of using certain original pre-Christian ideas without
compromising their religion and maintaining a certain freedom of thought.
To be continued tomorrow.
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