Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Genesis and the Fall. The biblical language of Part II is deliberate and sustained, for the Sphere seeks an apostle for his Gospel, the Square resolves to evangelise, and the Council hunts down those who claim revelations from another World. The weightiest echo is of Genesis 3. Looking down into the mines (§ 18), the Square cries “Behold, I am become as a God.” His words recall those spoken of Adam after the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:22), and they come at the moment when, as the serpent promised, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). In the next section he is telling the story of his Paradise and his Fall (see the notes). In Abbott’s Eden the sin is not knowledge but the thirst for more of it, and the Sphere’s answer, that seeing all things has not made his pupil more just or more loving, names the knowledge that was wanting.

Paul. The second cluster is Pauline. In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul tells of a man caught up to the third heaven who heard words no man may utter, a man lifted into a third dimension who has no words for what he sees, and the likeness is strong. In the same chapter Paul is given a thorn in the flesh lest he be “exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations” (12:7), which fits the Square’s ecstasy and fall closely. One echo is beyond doubt, for the King of Lineland, hearing a voice from a world he cannot see, describes himself as “seeing no man”, in the words used of Paul’s companions on the Damascus road (Acts 9:7). The Square’s last condition in his cell probably recalls 1 Corinthians 13, where “now I know in part” (13:12) and charity outranks every mystery. The Point’s creed, finally, probably borrows the formula of divine uniqueness, that there is none beside him (Deuteronomy 4:35), in the form that proud Babylon turns into a boast about itself (Isaiah 47:8).

Abbott’s own reading. Abbott twice returned to the analogy in his own theology, and both times he used it to deny that a higher dimension brings anyone nearer to God. In The Kernel and the Husk (1886), a book of letters on religion, he points his correspondent to “a little book recently published called Flatland”. He then asks whether spirits might be beings of the Fourth Dimension, able to enter closed rooms and to see the insides of things. His answer is that faith, hope and love, the virtues that abide, have no connection with the Fourth Dimension, and that “no knowledge of Quadridimensional space can guide us” towards the spirit. In The Spirit on the Waters (1897) he worked the book’s central picture into a chapter on the conception of God, and concluded that a visiting Super-solid might be no better than a convict escaped from his own land. In his own words, “a good Flatlander is more like God than a bad Super-solid”, and such speculation might at least “develop in us modesty”, which is the Dedication’s own word. These glosses settle three things. The Sphere’s rebuke in § 18, that seeing everything makes no one better, speaks for Abbott himself, and the Sphere is no figure of God or of Christ, but a teacher who can be wrong. And the book’s religious language is an analogy for the humility of faith, not a doctrine that heaven lies in a higher dimension.

Later readings. After Abbott the fourth dimension became a doctrine of the soul, and these readings, which he did not share, now belong to the book’s afterlife. The mathematician Charles Hinton, in A New Era of Thought (1888), set his readers to learn a block of twenty-seven coloured cubes from every side, so as to cast out the self from their sense of space. With higher space, he promised, “All those things may be real, whereof saints and philosophers have dreamed”, and the Square’s attempt to see a Cube with his eye closed is Hinton’s exercise before its time, an exercise that fails. The Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (Latin for The Third Instrument), in its English version of 1920, made the two-dimensional being the centre of a doctrine of higher consciousness and joined it to Plato’s Cave, without once naming Flatland. It is chiefly through such books that modern readers hear the Cave in Abbott. The American architect Claude Bragdon, one of Ouspensky’s translators, had named Flatland in his own A Primer of Higher Space (1913). There, in a parable called “Man the Square”, one Flatlander withdraws into his “higher self”, a term from Theosophy, the esoteric religious movement of the day. Abbott had answered all of them in advance. A creature may climb into any number of dimensions, his book says, and be no nearer heaven than a pick-pocket.

Relation to Other Works

Swift and the traveller’s tale. Flatland belongs to the family of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), satire conducted by changing the scale of the world, and the Square, listening to the “lilliputian grasshoppers” of Lineland (§ 14), plays Gulliver for a moment. The Spectator began its review of 1884 by recalling the tales of travellers. Abbott’s twist on the form is to make his traveller a native, so that the strange country he describes to the reader is his own home, and the land he visits is the reader’s. Gulliver comes home at last unable to bear the company of his own kind, while the Square comes back to Flatland with a truth and is put in prison for it.