LITERATURA PARENETICĂ. MODELELE BIZANTIN, OCCIDENTAL ȘI NAȚIONAL

👤Author

Name: Acad. Eugen Simion
Affiliation: Academia Română, preşedintele Secţiei de filologie şi literatură, directorul Institutului de Istorie şi Teorie Literară „G. Călinescu”
Contact: eugensimion@fnsa.ro

📄Article

Citation Recommendation: SIMION, Eugen. „Literatura parenetică. Modelele bizantin, occidental și național”. In: RITL, New Series, XII, No. 1-4, January-December 2018, p. 7-62.
Titlul: LITERATURA PARENETICĂ. MODELELE BIZANTIN, OCCIDENTAL ȘI NAȚIONAL
Title: PARENETIC LITERATURE. THE BYZANTINE, WESTERN AND NATIONAL MODEL
Pages: 7-62
Language: Romanian
URL: https://ritl.ro/pdf/2018/1-4/1_E_Simion.pdf

Abstract: This study is dedicated to the mediaeval writings, especially to the parenetic literature, a rather nonliterary genre offering, in close determination with the age and in a sententious manner, moral teachings, advice regarding human dignity and humility/religious austerity. The conceptual term of Middle Ages (id est an age of darkness, mysticism, scholastics, spiritual asceticism) is revised; it is shown, according to historian Le Goff, that the respective age was one of cathedrals, therefore of real creation in which, besides the representative types (the saint and the knight), a third emblematic character came into being: the solitary thinker, the meditative spirit who, looking for a model of existence, brings back the ideas, virtues and myths of Antiquity and, at the same time, thinks of himself in relation with the Divinity. Another question which the study proposes for debate is the one of the literary character of the parenetic writings, thought under a threefold aspect: (a) their aesthetic value; (b) influence and/or belonging to cultural structures before the literary languages were formed; (c) otherqualities, signs, topics of the national spirituality, as it is regularly done in revealing the fiction works. These writings, making up, in Umberto Eco’s opinion, “a culture of manuscripts”, are analysed in the following sequences: the Byzantime model, the Occidental model and the paranetic writings of the “Romanian Middle Ages”.

Keywords: Middle Ages, Parenetic Literature, Religion, Morality, Byzantium, Occident, autochthonous authors, literary character