Concerning the surface of God
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A chapter entitled “Concerning the Surface of God” in Alfred Jarry's 1911 Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician begins as follows:
- God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however, for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselves with two dimensions so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper.
Based on the vision of the mystic Anne-Catherine Emmerich and impenetrable mathematics Jarry goes on to conclude that “God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity,” or alternatively “the tangential point between zero and infinity.”
This calculation was probably inspired by the formula by François Rabelais, in Pantagruel in 1532 : « Cette sphère intellectuelle dont le centre est partout et dont la circonférence est nulle part, que nous appelons Dieu ». Jarry's calculation has been elaborated upon by Boris Vian and René Daumal.
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