On what can such a "revolutionary" act be based? If the "realistic illusion" that is typical to ethnographic museums is rejected, then what is the approach on which the museum's discourse must be founded? Horia Bernea has an explicit answer which he repeats any time he can: "we are testifying about a reality which is included in the Eastern spirituality" (Bernea, 1996: 7). More precisely, this is about the iconoclastic experience and about the deep sense which the Christian interdiction of "having a carved image" acquires in this experience. "Our Catholic brothers or Christians of other confessions or even people of different religions must know that, after the great iconoclastic crisis, Orthodoxy became extremely attentive with regard to "images," Bernea recalls (idem:9). In this vision, "the image doesn't represent Christ or the angel. It presents them." Bernea thus evokes "the fear of the ancient Church founders regarding the much too strict rules and their mistrust in excessive formalization" (idem:5). This "fear" gave birth to the Byzantine icon, with its entire particular universe of significance. This Christian Orthodox foundation is transposed in a museological vision, while Bernea often uses expressions like "Christian museography" or "Orthodox museography." That is, he fights for a "museography based on apophasis, which is ?negative? in the Christian mystical sense (...), and which defines through exclusion and circumscribes its sense by exclusion, and not by explicit statements, which are inevitably maiming" (idem: 7). Or, in a totally different language, this fear of the ancient fathers is translated as "an excess of formalization which impoverishes the quantity of information" (idem: 5). Therefore, we obtain a principle of a museography as a "trial to know the unknown," "an experiment in the phase of an endless beginning," which implies an "acceptance of the hazard"--while the museum stays, nevertheless, constantly "open" and "alive:" this is what Bernea calls a testifying museography. Not an affirmative one - and even less a positivist-explanatory one - but a feat on the verge of the "unknown," which "poses problems" more than suggests or indicates answers. From this point of view, the kind of knowledge proposed by Bernea's museography is very close to what Lucian Blaga stated as "Luciferian thinking," as opposed by him with "the paradisiacal thinking" (Blaga, 1943). "The crossing line between the two kinds of knowledge" starts with "the very idea of its problems": "to pose a problem in the sphere of Luciferian knowledge is to provoke a Luciferian crisis inside the ?object,? that is to open the way towards a mystery" (idem: 180). "The inner phenomenon of paradisiac knowledge is the determination of the object (...), or the gathering of adequate concepts regarding the fact that is was sensed, thought or imagined. The inner phenomenon of Luciferian knowledge is totally different: the crisis of the object and its various consecutive acts." (idem: 161). Unlike "paradisiacal thinking" (which may be roughly identified with what we generally understand by knowledge, at least since Kant, as Blaga suggests), Luciferian thinking is not directed towards the exhaustion of the "mystery," but towards its intensification, not towards what Blaga names "plus-knowledge," but, paradoxically in appearance, as it would seem to a positivist mind, towards "minus-knowledge:" "generally, any cognitive material, when seen from the perspective of Luciferian knowledge, becomes a revealed side of a mystery that is essentially hidden" (idem:179). |