by Umberto Eco
With this page from Proust, I should like to end my imperfect celebration of imperfection. In grammar, why is the imperfect tense so called? Perhaps it is no accident that, among the tenses which ought to tell us if something is happening, has happened, or will happen (even the imperative nudges us toward the future), and if it has happened more or less time ago, we have one that cannot or will not perform the function of temporal specification that all the other tenses do—one that leaves us uncertain about the temporal collocation of the event. And, in fact, when playing children imagine they are someone else, knowing that they are not, have not been, and never will be that person, they use the imperfect (“So, I was the Indian chief and you were Buffalo Bill …”).
In discussing Flaubert in Pleasures and Days, Proust said, “I confess that certain uses of the imperfect indicative—of this cruel tense that presents life to us as something ephemeral and at the same time passive, which brands our actions as illusion in the very moment in which it calls them up, obliterates them in the past without leaving us, as the simple past does, the consolation of activity—is still an inexhaustible source of mysterious sorrow for me.”
And that is how imperfection sometimes becomes essential to art.
[La Milanesiana, 2012]
10. Some Revelations on Secrecy
I ought to begin with a declaration that there is something of great importance I would have liked to convey to you but, as it is a secret, I must keep my mouth shut. By so doing I might acquire great prestige and might even convince you that, as the sixth Imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq, put it, “Our cause is a secret within a secret, the secret of something that remains hidden, a secret that may be disclosed only by another secret, a secret about a secret that is satisfied by a secret.”
All mythologies have had a god of secrecy; the figure of Harpocrates, under various names, appears from Egyptian art through the Graeco-Roman world to the Renaissance. But just for the pleasure of disobeying Harpocrates’s order, which enjoins silence, I shall offer you some revelations about secrecy.
A secret is information that is not revealed, or must not or should not be revealed, because if it were, that revelation would cause harm to whoever divulged it and sometimes even to those who received it.
Thus we speak of state secrets, official secrets, banking secrets, military secrets, and industrial secrets such as, for example, the recipe for Coca-Cola that is kept hidden away in Atlanta. These secrets (which really do concern something hidden) often wind up being revealed by order of investigating authorities, by the opening of state archives, through imprudence or treason, and especially by espionage.
To guard against espionage and protect their secret communications over the centuries, people have devised cryptographies. These are systems of rules that allow a given message expressed in some natural language to be transformed through a series of substitutions so clever that only a recipient who knows the rules for the substitutions can reverse the process to recover the original message. There are reports of secret writing in ancient India and in the Bible. Julius Caesar speaks of it, too, and we know there was a science of encryption in Arab civilization thanks to an 855 treatise: Abu Bakr Hammad an-Nabati’s Book of the Frenzied Devotee’s Desire to Learn About the Riddles of Ancient Scripts. The practice carries down through the fourteenth century Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun, which mentions a code used by secretaries swapping in names of perfumes, flowers, birds, and fruits to designate the letters.
In the modern era, with the birth of European states, the increasingly complex organization of armies, and military operations over a vast territory (this was the period of the Thirty Years War), the art of cryptography was further developed. One of the first modern systems is that of the moving discs used by Abbot Trithemius, in which a letter from the first circumference replaces a letter from the second. Perhaps the most illustrious example is that of the (far more complex) Nazi Enigma code, deciphered by Alan Turing. Since one of the principles of cryptography is that, no matter how perfect, all codes can be broken sooner or later, cryptographic secrets have a short life. And so we need take no further interest in them.
Likewise, we might take no interest in so-called “open secrets,” which, because they have been disclosed to a gossip, are instantly on everyone’s lips, except that sometimes secret services deliberately leak false revelations about false secrets to throw an adversary off track—with the result that many pseudo-secrets revealed in this way serve to conceal other secrets that tend to remain such.
In the baroque seventeenth century, the world of absolute powers, the idea gained ground that to survive in society, it was necessary to know how to simulate, either by presenting yourself as the opposite of what you were (as Baltasar Gracián taught) or by concealing your true nature (as Torquato Accetto advised). And a page from Cardinal Mazarin’s The Politicians’ Breviary (1684) offers a lesson for politicians in how to keep secret everything that concerns them:
If you need to write in a place frequented by many people, put a few sheets of paper you have already written upon on a reading-desk, as if you had to copy them. Let the sheet be evident, and in perspective; but the paper you are really writing on must also be lying on the table, and so protected that the only line that can be read by anyone coming near is the one you are transcribing. But cover what you have written with a book or two, or another piece of paper, or another sheet protected like the first but closer to the written one. If while you are reading, someone should observe you, immediately turn over several papers so that he might not discover what you are about; in fact it would be a good thing to have many open books in front of you, to offer that person with greater deftness one instead of another. If by chance you are writing letters, or reading some book, and a person should approach who might use the presence of that book or those letters to ask questions, then before he can open his mouth, you must question him.
Reserve
Basically, Mazarin’s behavior was an almost paranoid form of reserve, but reserve also covers personal secrets that sometimes vanish with the death of their possessor. Such secrets may concern acts that cannot be confessed, but not only those, because some people may wish legitimately not to make known their illnesses, sexual proclivities, or origins. Society recognizes the right to confidentiality and a sociologist such as Georg Simmel, in his study on secrecy, recognized this right as an important part of the social contract.
If anything, it is interesting to note that this right to privacy is gradually losing more and more value in our mass media society, where giving up confidentiality takes the form of exhibitionism. The largely beneficial safety valve that was gossip is disappearing. Classic gossip, the kind that went on in the village, in the porter’s lodge, or at the inn, was an element of social cohesion because not infrequently the gossips, instead of enjoying the misfortunes of those gossiped about, felt or showed pity.
This worked if the victims were not present and were unaware that they were victims (or saved face by pretending not to know). And so, for the value of the social safety valve of gossip to remain intact, everyone—tormentors and victims—was required to maintain reserve as much as possible. The first variation came along with specialist publications, which traded in gossip about people (actors and actresses, singers, monarchs in exile, playboys) who willingly exposed themselves to the gaze of photographers and journalists. This kind of gossip, once a whisper, became a shout, conferring fame upon the victims and thus arousing the envy of the nonfamous. Consequently television came up with programs in which anyone could become a famous victim by showing up to gossip about himself or herself. And the screens filled with people squabbling with their spouse about mutual infidelities, or desperately calling upon lovers or mistresses who had dumped them, or staging divorce proceedings in which their sexual incapacities were pitilessly analyzed.
It was fitting that, anticipating this social change, the reserved Piedmontese Cesare Pavese would commit suicide leaving a memorable message: “And don’t goss
ip too much.” But no one paid him any heed and by now we know everything about his unhappy love affairs.
But the abandonment of privacy has recently taken other forms. On the one hand we are aware but, all things considered, we do not seem to care that through credit card checks, phone records, and medical records anyone can know our every little move and everything about us; on the other hand the WikiLeaks case has persuaded us that making public the arcana imperii is a democratic operation, while every state and government should be allowed to keep some things confidential because making certain information, contacts, or projects public immediately is liable to cause them to fail, often with harmful consequences for the community. One example of this is the desire to make public consultations for the formation of a government immediately available in streaming, a situation in which people feel observed and so to avoid losing face they can only reiterate their official positions without conceding anything to negotiation—which is the soul of political relationships.
Secrecy and the Mysteries
The age of reserve has ended, but the idea of the mystery secret—or the hermetic and occult secret—has lived on for thousands of years now. The doctrine of Pythagoras presented itself as a knowledge of arcane truths, the fruit of a revelation received from the Egyptians. In a period marked by the crisis of classical rationalism, during the second century AD the pagan world tended more and more to identify truth with the secret, or with what is said in an obscure way. To be truly secret a form of wisdom had to be exotic and ancient. In particular, the East was ancient and spoke unknown languages, what is unknown is secret, and therefore must contain a part of that secret that only the divinity knows.
This attitude was the reverse of the attitude typical of the classical Greek intellectual, who saw the barbarians—oi barbaroi—as stutterers or, in other words, people who could not even articulate words. But later, it was precisely the alleged stuttering of the foreigner that went on to become a sacred language.
At this point we witness the birth of the notion that the truth is a secret, possessed by the guardians of a tradition now lost. And it was to be typical of all Renaissance texts on magic to point out that access to revelation comes through the utterance of tongues incomprehensible even to those who pronounce them, invented or modeled on a second-rate version of Hebrew.
The Rosicrucians
With regard to the fortunes of every doctrine that presents itself as a secret, the history of the Rosicrucians is worth examining. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the idea was making headway that a Golden Age was beginning, just when Europe was ablaze with national conflicts and denominational hatreds. In different forms, this climate of expectation pervaded both Catholic and Protestant regions and projects appeared for ideal republics, or for a hoped-for universal monarchy, and for a general renewal of customs and religious sensibility. In 1614 a manifesto appeared, the Fama fraternitatis, followed in 1615 by a second text, the Confessio fraternitatis Roseae crucis. Ad eruditos Europae. In these manifestos the mysterious Rosicrucian confraternity revealed its existence, gave information on its mythical founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, and predicted that an order would arise in Europe that possessed an abundance of gold, silver, and precious stones that would be distributed to kings to satisfy their legitimate needs and aims. The manifestos stressed the secret character of the confraternity and that their members cannot reveal their nature (“our edifice—even if a hundred thousand people had seen it from close to—will forever be intangible, indestructible and hidden from the ungodly world”). However, an appeal was made to all the scholars of Europe to make contact with the adepts of the order: “Even though we have not yet revealed our names, nor when we shall meet … anyone who sends us his name may confer with one of us in open speech or, were there any impediment, in writing.”
Almost immediately, from every part of Europe, people began writing appeals to the Rosicrucians, starting with an influential occultist such as Robert Fludd. No one claimed to know them, no one called themselves Rosicrucians, everyone tried to make them understand that they were in perfect accord with their program. Michael Maier in Themis aurea (1618) claimed that the confraternity really existed, but said that he was too humble a person to have ever been a part of it. Everyone allowed that the group was secret, and for this reason those who claimed to be members of the Rose-Cross (thereby failing to respect the commitment to confidentiality that binds the adepts) were not: “The usual behavior of Rosicrucian writers is to say that they are not themselves Rosicrucians” according to Frances Yates (1972). And this is what is believed to this day, at least if we are accept the view of an author who took the Rosicrucian idea very seriously, Réné Guénon: “It is probable that most of the so-called Brothers of the Rose-Cross were really only Rosicrucians.… Indeed, we can even be certain that they were not [Brothers] solely from the fact that they belonged to such associations; this may seem paradoxical and even contradictory at first glance, but can nonetheless be easily understood” (Perspectives on Initiation, 2014).
Consequently, not only is there no historical evidence of the existence of the brotherhood of the Rose-Cross, and at best we have clear historical evidence of the existence of successive groups—each of which claims to be the sole true heir of the original brotherhood, one example being AMORC, the Anticus et mysticus ordo rosae crucis whose pseudo-Egyptian temple you can still see in San José, California. But a Rosicrucian organization that claims to be part of a tradition going back thousands of years will be the first to tell you that the documents relating to that tradition cannot be accessed: “Naturally, you will understand,” the Manuel Rosicrucien (1984) says to this day “that the Grand Brotherhood and the Grand White Lodge are not visible organizations.” And in the official documents of the Anticus et mysticus ordo rosae crucis it is stated that the original texts that legitimize the order certainly exist, but for obvious reasons they are locked up in inaccessible archives.
In 1623, anonymous posters appeared in Paris announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians in the city, and this announcement triggered fierce controversy, including the suspicion that the Rosicrucians were Satan worshippers. Even Descartes, who during a trip to Germany had tried—it was said— to approach them (obviously without success), on his return to Paris was suspected of belonging to the confraternity. He got out of trouble with a master stroke: as it was commonly believed that the Rosicrucians were invisible, he made sure he was seen on many public occasions, and so debunked the rumors about him, as Adrien Baillet tells us in his Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691).
Poor Descartes’s bright idea tells us what Georg Simmel was to repeat in his essay on secrecy, namely that the typical characteristic of secret societies is invisibility—and come to think about it, secret associations like those of the Carbonari always desired invisibility, to such an extent that, as happened with the mysterious Illuminati of Bavaria (and as still happens today with some terrorist groups), each small group of followers knows only their group leader, but not the members of the hierarchies above them.
That many of the Carbonari ended up on the guillotine or in front of a firing squad does not depend so much on their secret having been leaked, but on the fact that if the aim of a secret association is to bring about an uprising, the secret ceases to be such when the uprising breaks out. There are secrets, such as that of a group planning a takeover bid for the conquest of a stock, but such things cease to be secret when the bid is a success or a spectacular failure. The secrets of groups intent on a specific purpose must have a very short life, otherwise the members of the group are just happy-go-lucky types incapable of accomplishing anything.
But things were very different with the Rosicrucians, who did not intend to achieve anything in the immediate future. In any event, to explain how this invisibility did not exclude their existence, a certain Neuhaus published in 1623, Pia & utilissima admonitio de Fratribus Rosae-Crucis in which he wondered if they existed, who they were, how they got their name, and to wha
t purpose they publicly revealed themselves; and he concluded with the extraordinary argument that “since they change and make anagrams of their names, and conceal their age, and come without being recognized, there is no logic that can deny that they necessarily exist.”
