Povestea proorocului Iona – o metaforă culturală antică în modernitate
The Story of the Prophet Jonah – An Ancient Cultural Metaphor in Modernity

Summary/Abstract: The present study focuses on the biblical Jonah as a nuclear cultural metaphor that traverses several civilizations. Cultural metaphor is a motor of transgenerational thinking because it carries imperative memory, that memory that demands to be listened to and followed. The authority of cultural metaphor results from its capacity to be the vehicle of fundamental ideas, placed in the vibrant fabric of a story with initiatory value. Therefore, at the center of the allegorical story is a hero who goes through an initiatory experience. When cultural metaphor is expressed literaly, the reader’s consciousness is invited to repeat or duplicate the hero’s initiation path, to understand it and to receive, as his personal good, the teaching that the hero reaches. The reader’s consciousness thus becomes solidary with the hero’s consciousness, but also with his world and its civilizational memory, through cathartic participation. In other words, cultural metaphor means memory and truth or true memory, because it is the bearer of a vision with which its creator identifies. The evolution of the story of Jonah as a cultural metaphor describes extremely significantly both the evolution of the person’s consciousness and the resistance to change of human nature, from the ancient Hebrews to today. We have chosen in this study two significant moments: the original text (The Book of the Prophet Jonah) and a Romanian play, entitled Jonah, by Marin Sorescu (1933-1993), written in 1970. Between the biblical prophet Jonah and Marin Sorescu, the creator of the character Jonah, there is a distance of almost 2,800 years. The biblical Jonah goes through a dramatic initiation, through a spiritual transformation that leads him towards the truth, but also towards overcoming his own human condition. And his Teacher is God himself. Marin Sorescu invents another Jonah, in a postmodern play where the direct reference to the biblical text forces the reader to a comparative meditation on the two hypostases of Jonah. Sorescu’s story wants to show that (post)modern man is a tragic figure, because he denies the need to submit to a Teacher, breaks the connection with God, chooses solitude, refuses initiation and inner transformation. The association of the two Jonahs disjunctively and summarily unites the irreconcilable opposition between biblical thinking and modern thinking.

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