One of my favourite short stories by Borges is "The Theologians"[1], which deals with a contest between two theologians in suppressing heresy. It's absolutely w

One of my favourite short stories by Borges is "The Theologians"[1], which deals with a contest between two theologians in suppressing heresy. It's absolutely wonderful how Borges managed to turn dry scholastic debate into a fascinating and gripping narrative. It also contains this wonderfully ironic scene when one of the theologian's past writings which was used to eradicate a previous heresy but have since fallen out of fashion was unearthed. The poor fellow insisted that it was still orthodox but everyone except him have moved on and under the latest opinion the old writing now appeared hopelessly heretical. I've extracted a paragraph below, but the whole story is quite short and well worth reading. >Four months later, a blacksmith of Aventinus, deluded by the Histriones’ deceptions, placed a huge iron sphere on the shoulders of his small son, so that his double might fly. The boy died; the horror engendered by this crime obliged John’s judges to assume an unexceptionable severity. He would not retract; he repeated that if he negated his proposition he would fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotones. He did not understand (did not want to understand) that to speak of the Monotones was to speak of the already forgotten. With somewhat senile insistence, he abundantly gave forth with the most brilliant periods of his former polemics; the judges did not even hear what had once enraptured them. Instead of trying to cleanse himself of the slightest blemish of Histrionism, he strove to demonstrate that the proposition of which he was accused was rigorously orthodox. He argued with the men on whose judgment his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake. [1] https://matiane.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/jorge-luis-borges-the-theologians/ https://matiane.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/jorge-luis-borges-t...