Demythicising and Remythicising the Mediterranean

EDGAR MORIN

"Demythicising and Remythicising the Mediterranean", is the subject of my article. Although the Mediterranean is evidently very old from a geographical and geological point of view, the word itself is very recent, and refers to the grouping together of several seas surrounded by land. Were there not already many seas between Anatolia and Gibraltar in ancient times? Of course the unification took place when it became the centre of the Roman Empire; the Mare Nostrum , "our" sea. But it was not until the 18th century that it was called the Mediterranean. It is a word which comes from a continental civilisation and which, above all, has connections with other continents, from a sea in the midst of lands; that is, Africa, Asia... ; the sea which lies between these lands. But as the Mediterranean became established as a word, so it secured itself as a reality, clearly geographic and strategic, then political and soon after poetic and mythological, certainly for the southern Europeans and even for the northern countries. Why? A poetic reality created by the sun, the light, the blue of the sea, and the landscape, a landscape that even in winter never withers. All this contributed to make up the Mediterranean pride, of course, but it became also a source of desire, of nostalgia, for the populations of the north, the world of Germanics who, stuck away in their cold lands, dream of the Mediterranean. Thus, it became a radiant idea ?"discover the country where the orange tree grows," say the French; and also a myth, a myth that personally I would qualify as euphoric and reductionist, and which was mixed up with the Greco-Latin image that excluded everything other than the porta eccolata , for the preservation solely of harmony, communication, and the source of civilisation, a civilisation mainly conceived as Greek and Latin, and as a place encompassing the good life.

But thinking of harmony, plenitude, and the gates of Greece and Rome, causes us to exclude the cruelty of the wars. Yet, there were wars. Firstly, Rome's terrible conquest of Greece; followed by their equally horrendous conquest and destruction of Carthage, The south was gradually forgotten, and the East too.

If we are to believe the history books, the Mediterranean is an area of antagonism and of conflict, a domain of tremendous creation, but also of the destruction of civilisations. A region encompassing not only rivalry amongst explorers, but also conflicts between the trading towns, conflicts of ideas, of religion, and I would even say of the extraordinary natures that it includes.

Thus, the Mediterranean is a region which has hatched many rich polytheisms: the polytheism of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, the polytheism of the Greek and Roman civilisations. And it is also the place that has given rise to monotheism; I would even say to the three monotheisms that are the branches of the same monotheism, one which instead of encouraging agreement and collaboration within its various derivations, has created only conflict, something that is still very much alive today.

The Mediterranean is evidently a place that has grown away from its mythology, a place that has founded clear reason and rationality, while remaining a region of madness and delirium. It is effectively a region that has sustained and nurtured scepticism.

It is also a region which has seen the birth of some of the most extravagant beliefs; in a way it is a micro-cosmos of the concoctions of the human mind, a race that is not only Homo sapiens but at the same time Homo demens . And, moreover, it is a region of amalgamation which appears to generate an amazing confusion. Braudel described it as the most extraordinary mixture of races, religions, customs and civilisations that the earth has ever known. So, we ask ourselves: where is this harmony? Where is this beautiful thing, this wisdom, if instead we find is this sensation of chaos?

In fact, this chaos is only an image of the complexity of the Mediterranean. The word complex means an ensemble, an ensemble of extremely diverse and heterogeneous elements which are related to each other, because even an antagonism associates its two conflicting elements. And this destructive chaos has also been constructive. I refer to the words of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, who said: "Unite what is agreed on with what is disagreed on." It is certainly a place both of agreement and disagreement and, above all, a matrix; in other words, a fertile, productive, cultivating place; a generator of diversity. We could even say that the conflicts have been integrated as a civilizing influence into the ideology of democracy. Because, in the end, a democracy is only given form through the confrontation of antagonistic ideals, which are played against each other according to the pacific rules of democracy, therefore avoiding that the conflict becomes violent and brutal. But at the same time it is a place where ideas can be challenged without the interlocutors physically exterminating each other. Philosophy and democracy were instituted in Athens during the same era. Moreover, the Mediterranean has been witness to the incredible phenomenon of the vanquished being those who civilise the vanquishers. There is a famous adage: the vanquished Greece revolted in fury to vanquish its vanquishers. The Roman Empire, when destroying Greece ?it ransacked Corinth? loaded several Greek thinkers and books into its saddlebags, so that some centuries later the whole Roman Empire spoke Greek; and its influence was felt all through Roman art and thought. Evidently the civilisation of the vanquishers depends on their not eradicating the vanquished, as Carthage, the Punic Carthage, was devastated. All this destruction must not be wiped from common memory, which is why the myth of the Mediterranean, as both reductionist and euphoric, must end, must be left behind.

However, you will say, why do I refer to remythicising the Mediterranean when, apparently, it ought to be demythicised? Firstly, what does remythicising mean? It obviously means the reassertion of strong affective, almost sacred, values, as to what the Mediterranean is and what is conceived as. But in order to do so, we must highlight the most important good thing that the Mediterranean has produced. What would that be? Its best thing is its universality; its universal ideas. And these universal ideas will be found in the Mediterranean regions. They even appeared in Egyptian antiquity with the worship of Aten, in the reign of Akenaten, which for a time drove out the worship of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Aten was, of course, expelled by the priests. But it is possible to perceive this universal potentiality which is later found in the message of Abraham and, more explicitly, in the writings of Paul. For Paul, there are no more Jews or gentiles, there are no more Greeks, they are all the same; in other words, there is universalism in the writings of Paul as there is a universalism in Islamic thought and Muhammad's preaching. Of course, we all know very well that this universalism has not prevented any of these religions from being extremely particularistic, or believing themselves the possessors of a revealed truth, which has led time and time again to religious wars. Wars, moreover, which never broke out during the reign of polytheism and pluralism of gods. Of course, we find universalism in Greek philosophy; we find it in late Roman law; and in the principle of democracy. And it was to be regenerated in the Humanism which emerged in Italy after the Quattrocento. Thus, this deeply rooted concept of universality, despite being co-existent with its contrary ideal, is the most important idea in the Mediterranean.

And this is what produces the virtues of universalism: meetings, exchanges, inter-racial breeding; I would even say the advantages of migration which, even today, continues to be a very important and useful thing, perhaps even necessary, both for the Northern and Southern Mediterranean.

But I think that remythicising the Mediterranean does not only mean picking out the positive elements to form a selection, but also finding and understanding the spirit of the matrix from which such a diversity of civilisations, cultures and ideas has emerged.

There is something generic about what has formed in the Mediterranean through the convergence of so many cultures. To explain the what I mean by generic I will use a metaphor. Biologists discovered not long ago that our organisms contained what are called stem cells. Stem cells are the embryonic cells of all animals, including humans. These cells have the greatest creative capacity of all, due to the fact that they are not specialised in any particular thing, and for this reason they are known as omnipotent.

The study of these stem cells is of crucial importance and we are even talking at present of embryonic cloning, for the purpose of using them to regenerate the organisms, for instance of a diseased heart or a defective liver. We have stem cells in our brain and in our spinal cord, but it has been recently discovered that they may be inactive or, at least, that they must be stimulated. I would use this description as a metaphor to say that such a thing exists as Mediterranean humanism stem cells, which are what have made the various civilisations possible.

But when a civilisation becomes inflexible or a belief becomes a dogma, clearly it becomes sterile and immobilised. At the root of the question, what does rediscovering and regenerating the Mediterranean mean? Well, it means rediscovering what it possesses in the sense of a generative matrix; it means rediscovering the inhibited or repressed potential within the different civilisations; it means finding in the Mediterranean what Paul Valéry was referring to when he called it: "a machine that makes civilisation".

If we take the idea seriously that it is possible to find a regenerative matrix, we arrive at the necessary remythicisation of the Mediterranean, because a myth is a strong idea, endowed with a power that is effective and great, and almost mystical. This remythicisation is in fact based on the image of the sea, perhaps because the sea is a source of life, and we know or we can presume that life was started there, conceived there, that the first unicellular life was created in an aquatic environment; if not in the sea, then at least aquatic. Moreover, our blood still contains a large quantity of salt. We retain something of this origin. Deeply inset within our mythologies there is a link between the ideas of the sea and the mother, maternity and the sea. We give the sea an element of mother and of matrix. Curiously, the Mediterranean is both vastly open and extremely closed: geological fate has enclosed it, unlike the ocean, which is infinite, limitless.

This sea, which is huge, but which however is on a human scale; and which enables us to travel to our neighbouring lands, whether they be friend or foe; must be perceived, then, in a profoundly affective sense. Without maternity, there is no fraternity. We know this unconsciously, given that we, as members of a nation, have a very strong feeling of what can be called patria. What does patria mean? Patria is a word which in itself has both maternal and paternal elements. It is a hermaphroditic word which begins as masculine with pater , father, and ends as feminine with tria . Moreover, we say "the mother country"; we maternalise the patria out of love, as we paternalise it because of the authority to which we owe respect and obedience.

The beginning of our national anthem, "La Marseillaise", which starts with “Allons enfants de la patrie" (Onward sons of the patria), expresses this idea, which creates a fraternalism between us. It is therefore evident, that based upon this maternal element of the Mediterranean, we will eventually be capable of fraternalism. We also rejoice at the fact that, basically, the concepts of light and blue are closely linked to the Mediterranean Sea, and that, despite all our pains and miseries, we feel the joy of being Mediterranean.

If we have this maternal concept of the Mediterreanean Sea deep within us, we must have, at the same time, the idea that we have to do everything possible for its preservation, and to save it from any danger. This leads us directly to the ecology of the Mediterranean, for this sea is the victim of large amounts of pollution that come from industrialisation and modern urbanisation, and putting its very life at risk. In order to maternalise the Mediterranean we must award its internal borders only a secondary importance, to encourage the move towards understanding and accordance, and to achieve the sense of a common identity. Our Mediterranean mythology, unlike myths that spawn ideas that are intolerant and dogmatic, brings instead a unification. If, as I have suggested, we take the best of the Mediterranean concept, the Mediterranean will enable us to make something sacred from something profane.