[In the following essay, Todoran compares Eminescu to two later Romanian poets, Tudor Arghezi and Lucien Blaga.]

“To speak about the poet is as if you shouted in a large cave. … Your words cannot reach him without disturbing his silence. The language of strings only could retell his delicate, lonely glory, by lulling it on a harp … You must only whisper respectfully, in an undertone … In a way, Eminescu is the all-immaculate saint of Romanian verse … His dimensions are by far greater than even our surrendering piety imagines … The mountain begins all around us and has no paths whatever … As you can't climb it, you just look at it and are contented with a few elf-like images … How could one possibly ever render the portrait of a shadow and of the endless time?”¹ These are the first words of Tudor Arghezi's evocation of Mihai Eminescu, fifty years after the latter's death; he views the poet projected against the background of eternity, as a perpetually gravitating constellation, never reached by mortals, for whom it gleams however, in a blue votive light, placed at a crossroads.

This vision of the “sacred mountain”—the “all-immaculate saint of Romanian verse”—identified by Arghezi with Eminescu, is opposed to the personality of Lucian Blaga, placed in a perspective which results from that particular construction of the philosophy of culture, which the latter poet applies to the Romanian phenomenon. Such a theory was put forth by the poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga in his Ewe-Lamb Space, in connection with the catalytic and moulding influences exerted upon Romanian culture in order to assimilate it to the intricate network of European decisive factors, as a specific phenomenon of “intellectuality” rendered manifest by very complex means². Hypothetically imagined as a spiritual substratum of the anonymous creations of Romanian culture, the “ewe-lamb space” is a “matrix space” which integrates the landscape in a certain way of regarding man's thought as related to the outer world; the “abysmal” is therefore a constant value of the soul, as if the cultural phenomenon, “stylistically” determined, found its true dimension only within itself. According to Blaga, the main feature of Romanian matrix space is the “descending transcendent”, the tendency towards the “organic”, as manifested in all the forms of folk culture and art; as an “abysmal phenomenon”, this feature was revealed in Eminescu's works, too. Namely, using the philosopher's own words: “a deep process, an organically Romanian one, burst out of ‘the nether world’, due first of all, to the poet's spiritual substance, but equally due to no lesser extent, to various foreign influences, which, in the last analysis, meant also in actual fact, a firm appeal to his own self … There is an ‘idea Eminescu’, and this idea conceived under Romanian stars.”³

If we compare the two appreciations of Eminescu's works namely T. Arghezi's and L. Blaga's, it is quite obvious that the two perspectives stand for two opposed directions taken by the fundamental relation between idea and image in the poet's thought. A research concerning the “idea Eminescu”—filtered through the “reverberating” features of the fundamental strata in his work within a generic “portrait” of Romanian culture (i.e. not a historically and culturally determined portrait, but an abysmal-structural one), as a modality of understanding the poetic “heights” by analysing its very “depths”—should motivate such a relation by deeply investigating Eminescu's poetry, actually the source of the two other poets, different though they are from one another.

In any modern poetic work, sense can be explored in relation to an “axis mundi”, provided such a work allows a complex exploration of its meaning; its constant values are then height and depth, the former being placed above, belonging to the “sky” while the latter is always placed beneath, as it belongs to “earth”, in the poet's thought (in any poet's thought), this axis is always represented by the two functions of the poetic, namely the idea and the image, as well as in various possible relations, which bear various labels in historical treatises of poetic, e.g. idea and figure, as the Antiquity used to call them, idea and form, as they appear in modern aesthetics, significans and signified, as the methods of the “new criticism” dub them. It is from such a twofold perspective that we are to define the main lines of Eminescu's poetic thought within Romanian literature, starting, of course, with the two other poets, already quoted.

T. Arghezi considered that Eminescu's “perfections”, like all perfection, are based on simplicity, therefore on the “idea”; still he viewed it not as a spontaneous, easily perceived idea, a void “concept”, but as an elaborate, geometrical one, since with Eminescu “the word is always matched with the idea”. As to Lucian Blaga, he speaks of the “unique atmosphere” in the poet's world, of his “imponderable elements of poetic magic, hardly perceived, vaguely seen, unexpected”. However, in Arghezi's appreciation, we ought perhaps to recognize his classical conception about poetry, in which the “image”, by substituting the poetic language for the standard one, is a “deviation” from the “idea”, so that, by a transfer of meaning, in the act of poetic thinking, any “image” can be reduced to an “idea”. Or, as Arghezi himself would have said, when commenting upon the simplicity of the poet's idea in spite of the diversity of the poetic images: “I've snatched a few lines from the Eminescian space, in order to convey the immersion of a different atmosphere in each and every line and the different shadow left by every image, in close dependence on the different sun beholding it. Within the poet's space, from its upper vault, the light floods divergently, in all directions. The Chaos is crowned by a round dance of moon-like stars”. On the other hand, Blaga has a modern concept about poetry as he says that: “Eminescu's poetry is built on various staves. It is pervaded with intricate complexes of highly personal underlying structures and it is by such original aspects that Eminescu is revealed to us”.

From Blaga's first motivation, from his idea of the “inner style” of culture, we infer that the “Idea Eminescu”, conceived from the “abysmal phenomenon”, from the “Fore-Mothers Stratum”, is equivalent with what Arghezi called “the Mountain”, viewed however from the inverted perspective of its invisible depths, i.e. of the “earth”, the “sacred mountain” of Romanian poetry; on its heights, the voice of the harp strings is surrounded by “silences”, for, as Blaga puts it, this vibration originates in a “matrix”, in a “depth” of its integration into, of its assimilation with, creative stylistic possibilities—born under Romanian stars—of the “Idea Eminescu”. The decisive elements of the matrix space of the “Idea Eminescu” should be revealed by the analysis of the poet's work, but even at this moment we can notice that the “Idea”, measured on the height of the “mountain”, is not an abstraction, but a “reality”; therefore the poet who appears “under the Romanian signs of the zodiac” is not, historically speaking, an unaccountable and unforeseen phenomenon within the space of Romanian culture; on the contrary, he brings with him exactly what belongs to the traditional background to the “Fore-Mothers Stratum”, moulded in his own work by a personal original form, closely depending on the genius of his creation.

But the considerations we've made so far concerning the poetic mood of the “Eminescian spirit” have only aimed to motivate the two parallel appreciations made by T. Arghezi and L. Blaga, because, for each one of them, as part of Eminescu's posterity, the fundamental aspects already noticed are not in harmony with their views as regards their own poetry; here, the perspectives are inverted. With Arghezi, the sense of the “real” intrudes between Silence and the word, it is the sense of the ugly which takes over the functions discharged by the beautiful; in the section of the central poetic stratum, the ugly is the lower level of the impetus towards the heights of the sublime, it illustrates the poetic vision of the sacred ugliness. With Blaga, on the other hand, the Word and the silence are always separated by a vibration revealing—“within” the real things—a transcendence of their own, due to their “ideal” nature from “beyond”: it is the upper level of their epiphanic mystery⁴.

In search of an immediate cultural influence, as far as Arghezi's poetry is concerned, we refer to Baudelaire's poetry, namely to the “descent” towards the abysses. The poet of the Fleurs du Mal founded his poetic art on a novel vision of the unity of the world, which, beyond the breaches of the “spiritual” and of the “animal”, of the desire to “ascent” and of the joy of the “descent”, leads to the being's reconstruction by the confrontation of two simultaneous attitudes: towards God and towards Satan, in a space of the “differance”, a means of sense revelation, in the poetic act, which by fostering the conflicts between the Same and the “other”, transforms the alterity into a consciousness of his own finite nature, viewed by the poet as a ceaseless search of passage⁵. And, along the same line, the transcendence towards mystery, viewed as Blaga's own attitude towards his poetry, can be referred to the “new-style”, entrusting the poet with the mission to penetrate into the core of things, rendered “present” to the spirit, which maintains the cognition function of poetry by inviting the agents to doubt about hopes by destroying the equilibrium between the inner and the outer world, always in favour of the former, since the latter is the recipient of spirit, the place of visible and tangible symbols, of all analogies, as Baudelaire used to think; such a poetry boasts metaphysical ambitions, by moulding the clear ideas of the mind into the forms of a complex mythology, the test of a mysterious capacity passing beyond the conscientious thought and even beyond the superior forms of emotional life⁶.

But, while thus referring the two poets to Baudelaire, a question arises in close connection to the “paradox” of the possible inversions occurring within poetry, namely as far as Arghezi is concerned: How is the immanent, from the idea to the image—while plunging us into the central poetic stratum—equally represented into the transcendent, in order to be able to speak about the descent as an act transferring to the transcendent the meaning of things, the “enchanting” meaning of words, while revealing the idea as a poetic image, so that the meaning which things transfer upon the transcendent is a perpetual “search” of the idea in the poetic image, and, with Blaga: How can the transcendent, from the image to the idea by ascending to the central poetic space, be represented at the level of the immanent; or, to put it differently, how can we refer to ascendence as an act which confers meaning to things from within themselves, a meaning always revealing the poetic image, opposed to the revelation as a poetic idea.

This question concerning Arghezi and Blaga, put in order to come back to Eminescu, arises from the “paradox” of modern poetry, namely from the reversion of contrary terms—the idea and the image, actually a reduplication of the double—, in order to outline the meaning which underlies poetic thought. In the rhetorical treaties of the Antiquity, the lineage of which, passing through the tradition of Classicism, can be still traced in the 19th century, classical poetry, which has resisted all the innovations brought about by Romanticism, was conceived as an example of perfect concord between the idea and the image, the latter being, in effect, a mere “deviation” from the former, a figure of expression within poetic language, as compared to the direct expression of the standard language. In modern poetry, the “deviation” becomes a substitution, never censored by reason, by a conception of the image as idea. Modern poetics views the terms of the opposition not as replaceable, but as recessive; one term is “represented” by the other, in such a way that the “primary”, dominant, term always brings about the second “recessive” one, which, though subordinate, confers significance to the former.

By thus relating two opposed terms—the idea and the image—of the poetic thinking, we can motivate their inversion in the “paradoxical” vision of modern poetry, namely with Arghezi and with Blaga. With Arghezi, a poet of the senses and of the material, the first, dominant, term is that of the “image”, it is a “visualisation” of the real, whereas the latter, secondary term, the recessive one, is the “ideal”, “divine” one, which conveys its significance to the former “by raising it towards a non-existent transcendent, in a search “without an object”. With Blaga, a poet of the metaphysical and of the mystery, the first, dominant, term is the “spiritual” term of the “idea”, while the secondary, recessive, one is a “real”, “earthly” term, which confers its significance to the former by making it “descend” towards a “transfigured” immanent, in a search of the absolute in the transcendence of the “mystery”.

Therefore, both in Arghezi's and in Blaga's case, the modern poetic vision is that of the Unity of the world, a fall from the Primordial, which poetry tends to remake through ceaselessly searching a “passage”; it is an originary reintegration of the outer world within the inner one. Such a vision was foretold by Baudelaire's poetry, who, by his comments upon those aspects of Romantic poetry, put forth a theory of the search as the basic meaning of the poetic; this way he was able to consider Romantic poetry as an embryo of a new form of poetic thinking, in actual fact, the very essence of modern poetry.

In the Romantic poems which view the world as a whole, irrespective of its particular aspects, the image is more important than the idea: poetry becomes a world by means of the word, from a primary idea, the latter becomes an image. In modern poetry, whatever is “beyond the word” is a “remake” of the wholeness of the world through the idea which, once included in the “image”, transforms the latter into an “idea”; consequently, “beyond the word” means “within the word”; the poem is a world within the word.

By thus turning back from modernism to Romanticism, in order to find in the latter trend the embryo of the former, we come again, as far as Romanian poetry is concerned, to the Eminescu moment, as he was a forerunner of Arghezi and Blaga, of the two philosophical directions of their poetry, one of them—a vision of the immanent, the other—of the transcendent, in a poetic language which, by the two opposite meanings of the “otherness” existing within the feeling of the “unity” of the world, renders the relation between the “idea” and the “image” by a perpetual alternation between the “descent” and the “ascent”, within the space of poetic thinking, by preserving the “paradoxical” coincidence of both contraries and unity, in one and the same world, namely the world of poetry.

Eminescu's poetic language discharges this double function: by means of the word it conveys an “idea” in a “different way”, always a philosophical meditation about the world, and also it conveys a “different” idea by the “image” of the world; in its turn, the latter is equally a meditation about the world, also made by means of the word.

To illustrate the distinction between the “idea” and the “image” in the “ewe-lamb-space” of poetry, let us quote from Eminescu's lines this metaphor of the “poetic”, for the sense of its building, within poetic thinking, at the surface level of the communication of the “idea” from the deep level of its “image” structure; the sample belongs to “The Panorama of Vanities”:

“My herd of dreams I take to pasture as a herd of golden sheep
One thing is the world of phantasms, spread with lovely golden flowers,
Quite another, were you trying life to forge like a goldsmith
Who tries hard metal to mould by the matrix of cold thought”(7)

“The herd of golden sheep”, “taken to pasture” by the poet⁸ as he identifies them with the “herd” of his dreams, or the “golden flowers” of his fantasy are the deviations or the “figures” of his language, “images” which, in the process of directly communicating his “ideas” are moulded by “cold”, uninvolved thinking (in compliance with the classical conception of poetry); nevertheless, during Romanticism, poetry becomes a means of cognition of the “intelligible”, as, beyond the word, now viewed as a means of making them equivalent, the image tells more than the idea, since the word is substituted by the “imaginary”; in its turn, the latter is a signal of reality, “transfigured” into an “ideal” by poetic thinking. But, at the meeting point of Romanticism and modernism, the imaginary (which belongs to the deep level of the image manifests a world at the surface level of the idea, by poetically matching the elements of this world, by moulding them in a sense-revealing matrix; this way the idea tells more than the image, for, even by replacing the abstract idea, it remains still intact, it is still an image, this way making poetry an instrument of re-creating the world, into an image-idea or into the symbol of poetic thinking.

In several of Eminescu's poems, the poet's philosophy is a meditation of the philosopher about the unity of the world in time and space, viewed as a self-consistent universe within the boundaries of its existence, whereas some other poems represent a poetic reorganization of the world by means of a language revealing metaphysical meanings. But it can also be the case that two different modalities of poetic thinking intermingle in one and the same poem. According to the first modality, in some lines of the former version of the “First Epistle”—preserved among the manuscript of the translation of the Critique of Pure Reasoning, the “aged teacher” pondering about the “borders” of existence in space and time is called Kant, which is, of course, a direct reference to the philosopher; in the next versions he became the “sage” teacher; taken back by thinking to what no human mind could comprehend to have existed, beyond whatever is perceived to exist:

“Over there an aged teacher, with his elbows jutting out
Through the threadbare jacket reckons and the sums cause him to pout.
Skinny as he is and hunch-backed, a most wretched ne'er-do-well,
He has in his little finger all the world, heaven and hell;
For behind his brow are looming both the future and the past,
And eternity's thick darkness he'll unravel at long last,
As, of old mythical Atlas propped the skies upon his shoulder,
He props universe and Chronos in a number—which is bolder …”(9)

The phrase “for behind his brow are looming both the future and the past” implies the subjective nature of time and space, according to Kant's philosophy viewed as a theory of the a priori forms of cognition of the objective world, incognizable in itself, beyond the surface of its subjective forms, whenever the thinker ponders upon its unity. This also explains the philosophical meaning of the old teacher's reflection upon the unity of the world, an object which—as it can be viewed almost as an “existence”—is offered to cognition in two ways: either as an appearance, perishable in time and changeable in space, or as an eternal reality, beyond these transcendental forms, as they are related to the transcendental as such, to the “thing as such”, unknowable since, once comprehended, it ranks among the forms of subjectivity and thus becomes appearance.

This is an old distinction in the history of philosophy. The relation between thinking and existence implies the distinction between to be within the thing and to be within the idea; Kant took it over from Plato as a distinction between the intelligible world of the “ideas” and the sensible world of the “images”. As a matter of fact, Plato himself was merely attempting to devise an interpretation of the two aspects of unity, namely the intelligible general and the sensible particular, as a possible reply to the fundamental questions lying at the basis of what Pythagora was the first to call “philosophy”, namely the “effort towards wisdom”, regarding the world as a unity of its constituents, i.e. a cosmos. The philosopher's questions and answers were as follows: “Which is the wisest entity? The number. Which is the most beautiful? The harmony.”

But these questions lead us to the philosopher's meditation about the philosophy of poetry. When, in Eminescu's poetry, the “old teacher”'s thinking “props universe and Cosmos in a number”, he is much “older” than Kant himself, he is the philosopher in the primary sense of the word. He ponders about the “borders” of existence in the relation between the comprehensible and the sensible, in compliance with the Pythagorean idea of the correspondence of the qualitative phenomena and of the quantitative process within a given order. A profound and unforeseen unity is perceived along the diversity; it is the fundamental principle which, according to the Pythagorean doctrine—based, in its turn, on the Orphic cosmogonies—is the cosmic unity, in which things are numbers. The unity of countable things in the world is a secret harmony, revealed only to those who, being initiated in the “mysteries”, can hear the “music of spheres”, as Eminescu puts it, in a Pythagorean vision of the cosmos.

However, we do not know too much about the originary form of the Orphism, as it was very early confounded with other mysteries and with Pythagoreanism, originated in a cult of nature, in Dionysiac rituals, which viewed nature as a cycle of oppositions as an “eternal return”. Beyond the religious doctrine of the initiation, Pythagoreanism equally implied a particular cosmogony; it was based on the opposition between the Sky and the Earth, translated by the proselytes in numerical relations, not without implying a dualist doctrine, of a Babylonian origin, based, in its turn, on Oriental philosophy, Pythagoreanism stipulated a coincidence of contraries to lie at the basis of the Universe. The Unity or the Monad comprises two fundamental oppositions: the Unlimited and the Limited, mixed by Harmony. “The Doctrine of Monads” could be inferred by Pythagora's disciples from the previous philosophy of the Ionians, from Anaximandros' hypothesis regarding the origin of the world in the mixture between air and fire around various condensing points; this hypothesis could lead to the idea of an infinite primordial substance, the matrix of things, conceived as a fire generating the matter as such by condensing it around a group of points or centers, forming a solid core, i.e. the Monad; the rarefied air which surrounded it also separates it from other, similar, masses¹⁰.

According to the Pythagorean doctrine, harmony was at the basis of all numbers; the latter are the essence of all things, therefore the world itself, namely the Limited and the Unlimited. This primary opposition generated a few others: the odd numbers correspond to the Limited, the even ones—to the Unlimited. Such is also the case of various other dualities, e.g. unity and plurality, rest and movement, masculine and feminine, straight and curve, light and darkness, good and bad. In Eminescu's cosmogony, which we've been used to interpret through the grill of other sources, namely the Rig-Veda Hymns and the Kant-Laplace theory, there are nevertheless various elements of the orphic cosmogonies. If the “old teacher” props “Cronos in a number”, the hypothesis of a pythagoreic vision cannot be excluded; in its turn the latter includes Anaximandros' cosmogonic hypothesis expressed by poetic images:

“Thinking takes him back through thousands upon thousands of hoar ages
To the very first, when being and non-being were nought still,
There was no estate of wisdom, nor a mind to comprehend.
For the darkness was as solid as is still the shadows' ocean,
And no eyes, had there been any, could have formed of it a notion.
Of the unmade things the shadows had not yet begun to gleam
And, with its own self-contented, peace eternal reigned supreme
Suddenly, a dot starts moving—the primeval lonely Other …
It becomes the father potent, of the void it makes the mother.
Weaker than a drop of water, this small dot that moves and bounds
Is the unrestricted ruler of the world's unbounded bounds.”(11)

In the tables made by the Pythagorean philosophers, analogies are based on the signification function, therefore the first column comprises the terms: limited, odd, one, rest, man, light, good—, whereas the second column contains the terms: unlimited, even, more, movement, woman, darkness, bad. These very oppositions also appear in Eminescu's cosmogony, ranged in an isotopic correspondence, viz. first column: light, movement, father, borders; second column: darkness, rest, mother, unbounded.

Leaving aside all other meanings implied by the poet's cosmogony, the pattern of the Pythagorean monads is quite obvious, and the more so is the possibility to consider Anaximandros' cosmogonical hypothesis as a source of Eminescu's cosmic image. We've been used to consider the old teacher's meditation to refer only to the “beginning” of the world, and not at all to its “ending”; the “end of the world” is the second term of Anaximandros' cosmogonical hypothesis. It is a revolution of the planets in the infinite primary substance, in compliance with the Pythagorean idea, transformed by the poet in a sombre vision, confirming the nothingness of the human world against the background of the cosmic infinite:

“Nowadays a thinker's judgement is restricted by no tether,
He projects it in a moment over centuries together.
To his eye the sun all-glorious is a red orb wrapt in shrouds,
Closing like a bleeding ulcer among all-darkening clouds,
He sees how the heavenly bodies in vast spaces freeze and run
Rebels that have torn the fetters of the dazzling light and sun
And, behold, the world's foundation is now blackened to the core,
And the stars, like leaves in autumn, flicker out and are no more
Lifeless time distends his body and becomes endless duration,
Because nothing ever happens in the boundless desolation.
In the night of non-existence all is crumbled, all are slain,
And, in keeping with its nature, peace eternal reigns again.”(12)

This “end of the world” vision, symmetrical to that of the “genesis”, besides its philosophical sources, confirms Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the “eternal present”; the existence of man is characterized by the completely useless “perishable” nature of all human elements, in sharp contrast with the “eternal” universe. This is a philosophical attitude of the thinker's irony; he looks down on the world, from the “height” of his reasoning, but, besides the ethics of renunciation, the Pythagorean model is equally present within the Schoppenhauerian pattern by the metaphysical considerations regarding the sense of the human values, always in a relation of opposition; these elements belong to a doctrine taken over by Pythagora's disciples from the Orphic philosophy.

Schopenhauer's metaphysics took over the renunciation ethics from the wisdom of the Upanishads, while, in its turn, in the Ancient Indian philosophy, the latter explain the Vedic meanings, as lesson about Unity. Eminescu's cosmogony, due to the influence of his native background, as an abysmal phenomenon in the surface stratum of the poetic idea, is given in “A Dacian's Prayer,” also a structurally abysmal motivation of the poetic vision, based on the matrix of the anonymous creations—beliefs and myths—belonging to an archaic structure of Romanian structure, by including the poetic symbols within an Orphic space, as a phenomenon of “spirituality”; this way a Romanian myth is created, where the cosmogony is actually a theogony of the Geto-Dacians, the ancestors of the Romanian people.

The cosmogony of the Rig-Vedic Hymns, used by Eminescu in the first version of “A Dacian's Prayer” was actually a theogony, the question about the “genesis” being the question about the name of that god who was there alone, before the creation of the world:

“Which God alone stood there before the Gods existed—
I wonder who the god is to whom we burn our embers?”(13)

The next versions are much closer to the poem “The Twins,” where the Dacian curses Zalmoxis, denying his almightiness, and celebrates the void, in the final version of the poem.

“When death did not exist, nor yet eternity,
Before the seed of life had first set living free,
When yesterday was nothing, and time had not begun,
And one included all things, and all was less than one.
When sun and moon and sky, the stars, the spinning earth
Were still part of the things that had not come to birth,
And You quite lonely stood … I ask myself with awe,
Who is this mighty God we bow ourselves before”.(14)

It is along the folklore tradition that the poet explains the representation of the ancient Dacian city, as a city of rocks and forests, mythologically personified by Fairy Dockya. Her way towards the time of the genesis appears even more grand, as it is amplified by the “golden flowers” of the imagination, projected against a mythical background:

“A big mountain arises all along the East horizon—
It is twice as height as any look uplifted to the sky can reach—
Rock piled on rock for ever, step by step endlessly seem
To the infinite to mount, and its top, wrapped in the heights,
Mere edges shows to humans in the darkness coloured blue:
It's mountain belonging half to our world of humans, half to godly infinite.”(15)

This description of Dockya's way—especially the main idea expressed in the last line—indicates the passage towards the source of historical time, which has unlimited dimensions and, for this very reason, return to the “beginnings” is mediated by a cosmogonic thought. A big “gate” appears in the core of the mountain:

“It's there that the Sun's charriot passes by his fiery horses driven;
It's there that at night rises the blonde Moon of silver shine
And the millions of stars spring in ever brighter flights
Spreading on the sky they people like saint flowers of gold.”(16)

Dockya's way, symbolically described as genesis witnessing the birth of gods, could have no other end in this fable of the “saint flowers” than the dwelling of the Dacian gods:

“Dacia's gods were living there—behind this solar gate—
And towards the world of mortals rocky stairs had to descend.
In the green darkness of forests Dacia's gods were gathering.”(17)

Zalmoxis, a god for the Getae, a man who had become a god, for the Greeks, a disciple of Pythagora, according to the information supplied to the latter by Herodotus—although the historian, who doubts its accuracy, specifies that Zalmoxis must have lived long before—, had retired, according to the same source, from among his worshipers and lived in a cave on the Kogaionon mountain, reappearing only three years afterwards only to show them that the secret of death is a gate towards immortality. In Eminescu's poetic myth, the mountain “belonging half to our world of humans, half to godly infinite” is the “Idea”, the initiation place, an Orphic space of the “descent”, enabling man to “ascend” towards the God's immortality.

Whether Zalmoxis' was a God of the Sky or a God of the Earth, philosophers can tell much more accurately than historians, because the “gate in the mountain”, from which the light emanates reaching “the world of mortals” is a “border”, marking the “coincidence” of opposites, according to the Orphic tables of Pythagora's disciples; this opposition enabled Plato to distinguish between the intelligible world and the sensible world. The latter world is an image of the former, in a “participation” relation that the philosopher explained by resorting to a “myth of the cave”; its inhabitants are unable to see the light directly, it is only its shade that reaches them and, whenever the philosopher descends in the sensible world, he is astonished by the darkness hiding the clarity of the Idea. Consequently, if perfection is identified to the Idea, the sensible world is only a “beautiful image” of the intelligible one.

A “beautiful image” therefore, since the Beautiful is only a sensible replica of the Intelligible. The ancient philosopher's enunciations allows us however to “rehabilitate” the poet, but the poet himself, starting from the very Antiquity, has acquired a right to be rehabilitated by his “beautiful” art. By the Orphic background of its mysteries, Pythagoreanism preserved the sense of man's spiritual liberation, according to the archetypal model of Dionysos-Zagreus, torn out by the Titans and revived as a divine spark in the soul of man; this theory was expressed by the Pythagorean doctrine in terms of an opposition, by ranging all things in a duality or polarity of their own, based on the coincidence of contraries, all deriving from the fundamental distinction between the intelligible idea and the sensible image. This coincidence is the source of the mist, which, according to Plato, another philosopher initiated in the Pythagorean doctrine, is to permeate the sparkling theory of the Ideas; the mist spread its obscurity over the future speculative attempts of Pythagora's disciples; the influence of this doctrine was to be felt; the same like Orphism (in its different versions) and like Neo-Platonicism, until the modern times: In the Renaissance, it was a discovery of man's real being, during the Age of Reasoning it took the form of religion and of astronomy, whereas the Romanticism expressed it as the harmonies and symbols of the invisible, as well as by the vision of darkness—a necessary step in the initiation of the “clairvoyant”, in all its hypostases, i.e. demon, titan, prophet, sage.

With Eminescu, such a vision becomes characteristic of Romanian poetic space, too; it is a poetic structure of the relation between the “idea” from the upper level of the “participation” and the “image” from its lower level. From Eminescu's very first lines, called Darkness and the Poet, a vision of the “darkness” which revives the “spirit” the poet defined the axis of his poetic thinking along the Orphic column of the two Dawns' palace, namely the Music and the Drama, that is to say Poetry and History, one of them being the “muse”, the “music from the stars above us”, the cosmic harmony pervading Orpheus enticing tune, whereas the other is the real life of mankind, revived by the poet's “song” in their “spirit”, i.e. “psyché”, namely the inner side of the human being, a demon that man is “doomed” to search within himself; according to the archaic tradition, this demon is related to the revolution of stars on the sky, to the “music of the spheres”, as the poet would have put it.

In an “abysmal” foundation of what has been called the “Idea Eminescu”, conceived within the “matrix space” of Romanian culture, the “sacred mountain” of poetic cosmogonies is the “mountain” of the magnus “as old as the world”, from the “Ghosts,” a historical episode added to the dowry of the Fairy Dockya. In his way towards his dwelling hidden in the mountains, the magus appears as a master of wilderness and a spirit of life, and he is the one searched, in the epoch of the gradual constitution of the Romanian people, by the conqueror from the North, who begs of them the resurrection of his sweetheart, “the Danube Queen”:

“Reaching at last the forest that clothes the rising hills,
Where does a sweet spring murmur, well out from 'neath a stone,
Where grey with scattered ashes an old hearth stands alone,
Where far off in the forest the earth-hound sounds his tone
And with his distant barking the midnight silence fills.”(18)

The Magus is seen like a force of cosmic love, therefore, within the inner being of man, he represents the Sources of Life, towards which all Romantic poets aimed; thus these Sources are equivalent to the feeling of the unity of the world, to the feeling of the Absolute.

The Magus of the “Ghosts” is also the one appearing in “The Emperor's Son without a Star,” a Romanian folklore tale, equally based on Dockya's myths, as a matrix stratum to which anyone aiming to understand the life secret is doomed to come back:

“From that source of the foamy rivers falling down
In the dark shadow left by endless woods of beech,
On the huge mountain whose forehead among the clouds steals out
Aiming to reach the Sun, an old Magus lives
Whatever mortal wants the secret of life to penetrate,
Is doomed this sacred mountain slowly to clamber up.”(19)

After this way towards the old Magus' wisdom, in the dream of the mortal who turns towards his inner self, by means of his own replica, a distinction is revealed, namely man comes to discern between sensitivity and reasoning:

“You think … By cold rays thought penetrates,
Striking the sweet elf-image that fantasy created.
And this elf-image then becomes as pale as ghost
So that no longer seen, it vanishes, confounded
With its source: the clouds or the unstable wave.”(20)

The elf-image created by fantasy and struck by the cold rays of thought which transforms it into a ghost is deprived by the sensible “reality”, whereas its return to the source, namely to the clouds and the unstable wave, is a clear reference to the genesis. In the relation between the “idea” and the “image” within the space of the imaginary, this elf-image is a generator of the poetic thinking between the “upper” level of reasoning and the “lower” level of imagination.

From this space placed between reasoning and imagination, the “mountain belonging half to the world of mortals and half to infinite” will open towards the “infinite” in “Hyperion”'s cosmogony-where the immortal being's “descent” in the real world triggers the “ascent” of the mortal to the Ideal equally comprising the “Idea” and the “image”; this way both the sky and the earth have a recessive nature, as they engender the imaginary, a generator of “fantasy” moulding the poet's reasoning. The “Star” of the “Magus Wandering among the Stars” (the title of another of Eminescu's poems), deprived of its primitive, magical significance during the elaboration of the poetic symbol, reaches the inner being of the genius, his immortal consciousness. The genius reaches this condition by being confronted to the “mortal”, in order to reveal an “immortal” meaning to the “mortals” by means of the Ideal dominating both “idea” and the “image”, i.e. the “double” aspect of man: mortality and immortality.

As a self-consciousness of the man of genius in the matrix space of Romanian culture, this is the “Idea Eminescu”.

Notes

1. T. Arghezi, Eminescu, “Vremea”, 1943, pp. 7-13.

2. L. Blaga, Spaţiul mioritic, 2nd edition, 1936, pp. 213-226.

3. E. Todoran, Secţiuniliterare, 1973, p. 293.

4. Id. ibid., p. 263.

5. Jean Burgos, Pentru o poetică a imaginarului, Univers, 1989, p. 239.

6. M. Raymond, De la Baudelaire la suprarealism, Univers, pp. 384-385.

7. Translation of the lines Mariana Neţ.

8. F. Enriques et G. de Santullans, Pythagoricens et Eleates, Hermann, 1936, p. 17.

9. Translation of the lines by Leon Leviţchi

10. Th. Gomperz, Les penseurs de la Grèce, I, Payot, 1928, p. 141.

11. Translation of the lines by Leon Leviţchi.

12. Translation of the lines by Leon Leviţchi

13. Translation of the lines by Corneliu M. Popescu.

14. Translation of the lines by Corneliu M. Popescu.

15. Translation of the lines by Mariana Neţ.

16. Translation of the lines by Mariana Neţ.

17. Translation of the lines by Mariana Neţ.

18. Translation of the lines by Corneliu M. Popescu.

19. Translation of the lines by Corneliu M. Popescu.

20. Translation of the lines by Mariana Neţ.