MUSEUMS
A visit to a museum is always an exciting occasion, and
often a frightening one as well. Now and then too one may observe
some rather touching scenes, as for instance a freethinker standing
before the fossil imprint of an archaeopteryx as if before an unveiled
relic. Unfortunately we lack concepts capable of dealing with such
observations-otherwise we should be able to profit from a trip like
the one Pausanias took in the second century A.D. to the places of
antiquity. We are at a loss to explain that thrill of awe which courses
through us when the astronomer recites the number of his light
years, or when the archeologist makes the gate of an unknown
metropolis rise from the. millenial dust.
Weare prone to underrate the strength and extension that the
museological passion has acquired and is acquiring every day. One
gets some notion of the insatiability of this appetite
if
one considers
how churches are changing into museums. Today the number of
those who go to church with only museological intentions is legion,
and the churches accommodate themselves to this state of affairs.
The church officials themselves cannot escape this development–
the distinction between sacristan and curator is imperceptibly being
obliterated. This is matched, among other things, by the transforma–
tion of relics from sacral into museological objects. So for example on
the island of Reichenau there is an ancient jug of which for centuries
it was never doubted that it did service at the marriage in Cana.
Today it is spoken of as a curiosity; the respect claimed for it re–
sembles that which we accord a vase of the Ming Dynasty.
This transformation, which it often takes a sharp eye to detect,
has like all things its political side. Church and State meet together
in the sphere of the museological as in a common antechamber.
Situations arise in which Leviathan could gobble up in one bite every–
thing that the course of secularization has left untouched, did not
a certain diffidence hold it back. Moreover, an arrangement giving
the Church a kind of museological curatorship over its possessions is
a much cleverer one than anything that might be effected by the
separation of Church and State, or even by the use of force. It is a
