ABSTRACT
The “true saying,” credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd), widely accepted as an affirmation of faith over reason, is itself an absurdity, arising from a misunderstanding of what Tertullian wrote. This essay considers how this maxim has informed the Modernist aesthetic, with particular emphasis on its presence in the earlier writings of Samuel Beckett, which responded initially to Joyce (the “epiphany”) and Proust (the Proustian “moment”) but ran up against an aesthetic impasse that would be of enduring complexity in writings to come: Beckett’s acknowledgment of the transcendent experience, but his inability to invest that experience with any enduring significance. Many forces, both personal and literary, contributed to the “turn” in Beckett’s poetics, finding expression in his decision to move to Paris and write primarily in French; and in an aesthetic evolution reflected in the humilitas of the De Imitatione Christi of Thomas à Kempis and the Ethica of Arnold Geulincx, these offset against the radical absurdity of Sartre’s understanding of the Imagination.
