May 20, 2019
Let Us Begin the Week on a High Note
“METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT IN EMINESCU’S POETRY
The destiny and the function of a poet are bound, in sovereign fashion, to the transcendent qualitative aspect of the “silence within words”; there where the word is the absence of the divine Silence and light is the absence, in measures deeply hidden, of the supreme Darkness. Always unique and unrepeatable, incomparable with himself at every step in eternity, he abolishes conceptual boundaries and founds noetically our being, which tends irrepressibly towards the Absolute. The rigour of his undertaking is above all else, for we know no other human act which resembles, in this respect, this manner of “bringing out of non-being that which has being” — as Plato defines the term *poiein* in the *Symposium*, 205b — through the mirroring in creation of the divine *logos*.
Therefore any approach to Eminescu’s poetry from the perspective of a literary current, of literary theory and history in general, is decisively partial, superficial, perhaps effective aesthetically, but certainly lacking in depth and in authentic spiritual contribution. The years of true apprenticeship in the “grave and sublime disciplines of the spirit” bore fruit in a wholly special and exceptional manner: they stimulated unique intellectual capacities, they gave new dimensions to a vision that showed itself from adolescence to be well founded and of great altitude, they reconfigured constellations of spiritual values which found in him their most brilliant interpreter, truly “inspired and In-spirited”, the august voice through which they poured into the world like a beneficent and blessed light.
There are, indisputably, poets of genius in our literature; Eminescu, however, is “the absolute poet”!
Eminescu’s lyric poetry bears witness to spiritual altitudes, to intellectual capacities which certainly prove an understanding that subsumes both the philosophical and the theological horizon in an admirable way: the poet offers us, in the Romanian language, the most comprehensive and lofty expression of metaphysics; and what is wholly exceptional is that he goes beyond the so-called metaphysics understood, to a certain extent superficially, by the German philosophers of the last half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the following one (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc.), reduced for some centuries to its most superficial sense, that of an “ontology of the reality beyond matter” — restoring to it, in poetic expression, its whole sense of “knowledge of the Universal, of the Absolute, of the Infinite”, as he discovered it in his thorough studies in the field of Oriental doctrines, especially the Hindu and Buddhist ones. Although we have no clear proof that he knew the work of Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), it is perfectly clear that he distinguished between the Absolute Principle (called by M. Eckhart *Gottheit*) and its aspect manifested as universal Creator and Orderer (or God, called by the great Rhenish mystic *Gott*), which is characteristic of an authentic metaphysical perspective. Although the term as such is taken from Aristotle, by which he designated “the writings after the treatise *Physica*”, we do not know very well how much he had preserved of the genuine metaphysical doctrine of his master, Plato; but the fact that he designates “form” by the term *eidos* — “idea, essence” — of Platonic provenance, demonstrates what has been affirmed.
And without needing to have recourse to the metaphysical content of the Hindu doctrines, we shall show that Plato himself has such a perspective, which emerges abundantly from the dialogues *Republic* (509b 6-10), *Parmenides* (137c4-142a8) and the *Sophist* (244e-245b). The Neoplatonists — Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Damascius, Iamblichus — will continue in this sense.
Eminescu’s verse is as clear as can be:
1. In the beginning, when there was neither being nor non-being, 2. When all was want of life and of will, 3. When nothing hid itself, though all was hidden… 4. When, penetrated by His own Self, the Unpenetrated rested. 5. Was there an abyss? a chasm? was there a wide waste of water? 6. There was no world conceived, nor any mind to conceive it. 7. For there was a darkness like a sea without a ray, 8. Yet neither was there aught to be seen, nor an eye to see it. 9. The shadow of things unmade had not begun to unfold, 10. And, at peace within itself, eternal peace held sway!…
(M. Eminescu — *First Epistle*).
All the elements of a metaphysical perspective, of a metaphysical thought, are present:
— The Absolute Principle comprises equally Being — as principle of universal manifestation — and that which is beyond, outside it, a reality which we can designate only by a negative term: Non-Being (and not Nothingness, so as to avoid the sense of “want” of Being and to underline that of “absence” of Being), since we have no “common cognitive measure with this reality”. Eminescu’s expression is of a negative form (line 1) through an apophatic approach, since the affirmation of a supreme, indescribable Reality is impossible given its infinity — whereas affirmation is par excellence an indirect indication of certain conceivable limits by means of which the “object of the process of knowledge” may be cognitively identified.
— The Absolute Principle is universal Possibility, that which contains the Whole virtually, through an affirmation, this time, of unlimited meaning (line 3): in universal Possibility nothing “is hidden”, for the duality “hiding — manifestation” does not exist; but at the same time this state can be only one of absolute Non-Manifestation.
— The Absolute Principle is supreme Ipseity, in other words “it is that which is in itself”, without any distinction or quality, in a state of perfect virtuality, from which a certain “tension” is not absent, a tension that may “relax” through Being as principle of universal manifestation (line 4).
— This principial state, prior to any manifestation, is designated in traditions of metaphysical consistency as “the superior or divine Darkness” (line 7). The absence of Light (creative: *Fiat Lux!*) is expressed by the lack of its constitutive and dynamic element: *without a ray*, indicating thereby the purity and perfection described apophatically.
— The Pleroma (divine Plenitude) is poetically expressed, in the form of the initial archetypal Virtuality (line 9); in other words, not the things, the second realities which are to be created, but their essential “schemes”, through that which is “uncreated” in them: their essence, which through the appearance of the creative Light is present in the “shadow” of the created thing; the spiritual traditions call these essential “possibilities” “shadows” or “signs”.
— Finally, the quoted fragment ends with the sovereign expression: *eternal peace* (line 10); it recalls a sapiential formulation belonging to one of the greatest spiritual masters of Taoism, Lie-Tzu: “The state of peace in the Void is an indefinable state.” Now, “the Great Peace” (*as-Sakīnah* in Arabic, *Chaturtha*, “the fourth state”, in the *Mandukya Upanishad*, etc.) is the expression of supreme Plenitude, which is the Void, or supreme Indistinction. Eternity is the absence of time, of duration, whose imperfect expression — in the Platonic sense — is perpetuity; perpetuity is a substitute for eternity, said V. Lovinescu.
As is natural for any traditional ontogony and cosmogony, universal Manifestation is described through the direct action of its principle: Being — though it in itself remains unmanifested, from “the beginnings”, or “in the beginnings” — owing to the tendency, the virtual tension (line 10) which pre-exists in universal Possibility:
1. But of a sudden a point stirs… the first and the only. Behold it, 2. How out of chaos it makes a mother, and itself becomes the Father… 3. That point of movement, far frailer than a bead of foam, 4. Is the boundless master over the bounds of the world… 5. From then the eternal mist unravels into strips, 6. From then rise up the world, the moon, the sun and the elements… 7. From then until today, colonies of lost worlds 8. Come out of the grey horizons of chaos by unknown paths 9. And in luminous swarms welling up out of the infinite, 10. Are drawn to life by a boundless longing.
(M. Eminescu — *First Epistle*)
The transformation, the ordering of primordial Chaos; the “pilgrimage” of the creative Light which works in the Darkness primary and principial distinctions from the cosmogonic and cosmological point of view; the multitude of created worlds, sprung from a cosmic breath produced by the universal “contraction” like a “tsunami” returning upon itself with every pulsation, after the manner of the divine scenario of Lurianic Kabbalah, out of the mysteries of an endless expanse of a remembrance of the Demiurge, out of the mist of the abyss of an unknown purpose. This is Creation, the fundamental divine act which has as its result “the world”, in all its amplitude, with its lack of “ground of its own”, with its illusory and continually changing character; its contingent, immanent character, in contrast with the Transcendent, and of the consistency of “a dream, a smoke, a perfume” (as Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī said); a “dream” which it is impossible for you to understand in the vastness of its meaning, as another great Taoist spiritual master (Zhuangzi) asked himself: “Am I the one who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that he is Zhuangzi?”; and, as in that “parable”, the answer is whispered to you without delay: “Neither the one nor the other; it is only a transitory and illusory modification of the Absolute!”… or in other words: it is of no importance!
The Sanskrit term and concept *Maha Maya* (“the Great [universal] Illusion” — *Shakti*, or the feminine aspect of the Principle at the level of creation, therefore separated from her Lord and consequently of an inferior and exclusively cosmic sense) cannot be described or rendered better than Eminescu does:
1. In that boundlessness we spin, forgetting utterly 2. That this whole world is a suspended instant, 3. That behind it and before it darkness shows itself. 4. As the dust plays within the empire of a ray, 5. A thousand violet threads that cease together with the ray, 6. So, in the night of eternity, for ever deep, 7. We have the instant, we have the ray, which holds a little longer yet… 8. When it goes out, all perishes, like a shadow in the dark, 9. For the chimerical universe is the dream of non-being…
(M. Eminescu — *First Epistle*)
The contingent, evanescent character of creation is evident; more than that, there appears also the “initial suspension” (line 4), known in Islamic esoteric tradition by the name *habā* and in ancient Greek philosophy by that of *Hyle*, which constitutes a further proof of the authentically traditional manner in which the poet thinks. In the same fragment we also have indicated the two limitative and determinant existential conditions of Genesis, as manifesting themselves principially (line 7): the instant, generator of duration, itself in a pure, non-dimensional state; and the ray, as a generic *topos* of extension, of spatial comprehension — a ray of Light producing, through *Fiat Lux*, the plane of reference and constitution of universal Existence.
And since the life of this world, with its cycles and sub-cycles of manifestation, has a regressive course — from the golden age to the iron age, from the paradisiacal age to that of total degeneration — until its reintegration into the Principle, the poet sets before us the apocalyptic scenario as we find it, in its essence, in all the sacred texts of the traditions, be they religions or traditions of metaphysical consistency.
1. The sun that today is proud, he sees it sad and red 2. Closing like a wound among the darkened clouds, 3. He sees all the planets freeze and hurl themselves rebellious into space, 4. Escaped from the reins of the light and of the sun; 5. And the iconostasis of the world has blackened to its depths, 6. Like the leaves of autumn all the stars have perished; 7. Dead time stretches out its body and becomes eternity, 8. For nothing happens in the desolate expanse, 9. And in the night of non-being all falls, all falls silent, 10. For, at peace within itself, eternal peace begins again… ……………………………………………………..
(M. Eminescu — *First Epistle*)
The quoted fragment resonates impeccably with a stanza from *Ébauche d’un serpent* by Paul Valéry, in which “the universe is but a flaw [an impurity, in context] / In the purity of Non-Being”; consequently the whole existence of the universe stands under the seal of the end, of the expiation of this imperfection, suggested in line 2 by the word *wound*, which is universal Manifestation in the face of principial, absolute Non-Manifestation, in the face of the Great Peace. Moreover, a prophet made the following affirmation: “Original sin is existence itself!” — an “original sin” which must not be understood in the moral sense, incompatible with the metaphysical perspective, but in that which Plato gives it, that is, in relation to the perfection and the absolute character of the eternal Ideas.
In line 5 there is a term which proves once again the altitude of Eminescu’s symbolic metaphysical thought: the *iconostasis*; irremediably opacified (“blackened to its depths”) owing to the ending of the cosmic cycle, it represents the interrupted link between the “intermediate heaven” (in church architecture: the nave) and the divine Presence active in creation (symbolised by the altar). This “interval” — *barzakh* in Islamic esoterism, *sandhya* in the Hindu tradition — becoming “inoperative”, no longer has the same function of “uniting and separating” the two realities, but becomes an irremediable abyss of the incommensurability between them. Becoming now has a single direction: reintegration into the Principle of universal manifestation, then, from there, extinction in the Absolute. The “exchange of good offices” between Heaven and creation, which legitimated and founded the existence of the latter, disappears at the same time as the suppression of duration, of the determining temporal condition (line 7); the nostalgia of Substance and the melancholy of the Spirit have come to coincide in the Great Peace, there where every distinction disappears. Being itself, principial, returns to the Non-Manifested through Non-Being (line 9). “Silence” is here the evident symbol of the divine Darkness out of which all appeared and in which all was extinguished.
“All will perish save His Face…” it is affirmed in the Qur’an.
*
The wise old man “Heidegger”, as V. Lovinescu called him, reminds us of Hölderlin’s fundamental question: “Why poets in destitute times?” … that time which can no longer feel even “the lack of the God”; this God is the one whom the ancients called “the unknown God” — not because he was unknowable, but because no distinction, no divine quality or attribute was possible; a “God” equivalent, perhaps, to *Brahma Nirguna Nirvishesha* — the absolute Principle in the Hindu tradition.
A “destitute time”, because in the nineteenth century the authentic Romanian tradition was definitively and tragically occulted, there surviving it the most important content that could express spiritual altitude and amplitude — for those who can still understand — so often forgotten or simply collected like anything that has become unfashionable: folklore. For Eminescu and for some of his contemporaries this process is evident, determining them to take a stand; this perhaps also explains the conservative convictions they expressed so often and above all so consistently: Eminescu’s lyric poetry; the comedies of I. L. Caragiale, which are true tragedies determined by the imposition of a new “mentality”, so foreign to the Romanian spirit; and not least the mysterious, misunderstood Creangă — the personality perhaps most “caricatured”, owing to the intellectual incapacity and the ignorance characteristic of the scholars of his time; more than a century after his death there occurs a unique “rehabilitation”, magisterial moreover, on the part of Vasile Lovinescu; Creangă’s influence upon Eminescu is another great mystery of our literature.
A “destitute time”, a synthesis of major imbalances and dysfunctions, above which, sovereign, like a horizon of “the light that knows no evening”, stands Eminescu — our “watchman” unto authentic spirituality, unto Truth — and for this he is “the absolute poet”; with him “we have a chance at eternity”.”
by Teodoru Ghiondea
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