Lucian Blaga

Works

• 1936The Mioritic Space

  Interprets Romanian folk culture through an unconscious “stylistic matrix”: the undulating space of hill and valley named after the ballad Mioriţa.

• 1943Trilogy of Knowledge

  Distinguishes “paradisiac” knowledge, which reduces mystery, from “Luciferian” knowledge, which deepens it, and argues that the “Great Anonymous” subjects all human knowledge to a “transcendent censorship” that keeps it from ever grasping the absolute.

Position

Blaga built one of the few complete philosophical systems of twentieth-century Romanian thought, set out in trilogies of knowledge (1943), culture (1944) and values (1946) and an unfinished cosmological trilogy. At its centre stands mystery: a creative principle, the “Great Anonymous”, protects the world from full penetration by human knowledge through a “transcendent censorship”. Human beings are nonetheless made for creation. They know in two ways: “paradisiac” knowledge reduces mystery by explanation, “Luciferian” knowledge opens a problem within it and so deepens it. In his philosophy of culture, especially “Horizon and Style” (1935) and “The Mioritic Space” (1936), Blaga argued that cultures are shaped by an unconscious “stylistic matrix” of “abyssal categories” – spatial and temporal horizon, an accent of value, an attitude of advance or retreat, a formative impulse – which, in a Kant-inspired move, he placed beside the conscious categories of knowledge. He engaged with Frobenius and Spengler, whose morphology of cultures he wished to ground in the unconscious. Orthodox theologians, above all Dumitru Stăniloae (1942), criticised his metaphysics as incompatible with Christianity; under communism he was censored as an idealist. Critics have noted that the idea of a “mioritic” Romanian soul invites a nationalist essentialism; Blaga himself presented it as a theory of style, not of descent.

Life & context

Lucian Blaga was born on 9 May 1895 in Lancrăm near Sebeş in Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary, the son of an Orthodox priest. During the First World War he studied theology in Sibiu and Oradea, then philosophy and biology in Vienna, where he took his doctorate in 1920 with a dissertation on “Kultur und Erkenntnis”. In 1919 his first volume of poems, “Poems of Light”, and a book of aphorisms made him known in Romania. From 1926 he served as a diplomat, as press attaché and counsellor in Warsaw, Prague, Bern and Vienna, and in 1938 as minister plenipotentiary in Lisbon. Elected to the Romanian Academy in 1936, he gave his inaugural address “In Praise of the Romanian Village” in 1937. From 1939 he held the chair of philosophy of culture at the University of Cluj, which moved to Sibiu after the Second Vienna Award of 1940; there he edited the journal “Saeculum” (1943). In 1948 the communist regime removed him from his chair and from the Academy; he worked as a librarian and researcher in Cluj and could publish mainly translations, among them Goethe’s “Faust”. He died in Cluj on 6 May 1961. Some of his works, such as the novel “Luntrea lui Caron”, appeared only after 1989.

Further main works

• Poems of Light (Poemele luminii, 1919)
• The Dogmatic Aeon (Eonul dogmatic, 1931)
• Luciferian Knowledge (Cunoaşterea luciferică, 1933)
• Horizon and Style (Orizont şi stil, 1935)