“A man of rare intellectual and spiritual probity, without any moral compromise”.

Massive, fat, with a face clouded with thoughts, veiled as if by the veil that a contemplative nature, long accustomed to meditation, places on the face of a man, this is how Mircea Vulcănescu appeared to me when I saw and met him.

Assistant at the Ethics Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Bucharest, alongside the sociologist Professor D. Gusti, he was also a member of the Research Office of the Ministry of Finance and was appointed as a young Director General of Customs, combining these activities with that of a publicist for various literary magazines and newspapers (Cuvântul, Familia, Criterior, Izvoare de filozofie, etc.).

When he lectured at the Foundație or at the Dalles, although he was warned not to exceed one hour, he spoke at his own pace. The man had no sense of limited time. What he had to say was expressed so impetuously that he forgot time and place. That’s why, after an hour, the hall slowly, slowly began to empty of listeners who were losing patience. There was a commotion and a hustle and bustle that Mircea Vulcănescu didn’t care for, he was absent from this performance, he was only concerned with what he had to say.

He was not usually an entertainer, but as a speaker he was possessed by his ideas and the need to share them with his audience.

He was a bookworm. Philosophy, literature, history, theology, economics, finance. You’d be amazed at how much he knew: all of it in depth.

He had prepared two doctorates in Paris: one in philosophy, the other in economics. In the end, he didn’t presented them out of an excess of intellectual probity, probably because he thought his theses weren’t perfectly put together. He was undoubtedly the best equipped head of his generation. His students were amazed by the erudition of this professor, who combined his capacity for knowledge with a great moral conscience and an impressive spiritual life, which was also evident in what he published. I have heard that he still wrote a great deal, but that he mostly put everything in a drawer to rot.

As I said, he was a man of exemplary honesty, not afraid to compromise, not afraid to speak his mind on any subject. I remember that, during the dictatorship of Charles II, he had the courage to vote against a plebiscite that would have introduced the death penalty, even though, as a senior civil servant, such a vote could have brought him various material inconveniences.

This man had something of the knight “sans peur et sans reproche”. For example, when his former philosophy teacher, Nae Ionescu, bought a Mercedes from Germany as Director-General of Customs and asked him to waive customs duties, Mircea Vulcănescu’s opinion was negative.  However, this incident did not affect the relationship of mutual respect and esteem. In fact, Mircea Vulcănescu was one of the few people Nae Ionescu wanted to see when he was dying. […]

An encyclopaedic mind, Mircea Vulcănescu was in some ways personal and a Rabelaisian type. It is said that when he went into a pastry shop he ate ten cakes. I verified the truth of this legend on the evening of Petru Comarnescu’s departure for America on a Rockefeller scholarship, when a group of young people and I went to the train station to greet the lucky scholar as he left. Mircea Vulcănescu was among them. From the station we walked back to the city centre, in the middle of the street – there were many of us – to the amusement of passers-by. In the palace square we dispersed after a completely free and innocent youth demonstration. I stayed on the Corso with another friend, two of us, and Mircea Vulcănescu. It was summer and we were sitting at one of the tables in front of the café. While we talked, Mircea Vulcănescu devoured two ice-creams, four or five cakes and I don’t know how many portions of peanuts, while we declared ourselves archly satisfied with one ice-cream and a few peanuts, even though we were constantly urged to help ourselves like him. And perhaps Vulcanscu was sober that night, seeing our fragility and reluctance in this matter. He ate and talked, not waiting for our response, to overwhelm and fascinate us with all he felt and had to say about everything.

He looked at us with eyes that seemed absent, or rather inward, completely focused on the thoughts he shared with magnetic eloquence. Listening to him, we had the impression that a colossus was unfolding before us.

The last time I saw him, he told me that in the few free hours he had, he was learning Chinese and translating the poems of François Villon. He even recited some of these translations to me. He has also translated some of Rilke’s poems.

Sometime around 1936, if I’m not mistaken, he wrote a few lines (reproduced in the magazine “Vremea” on the “Facts and Ideas” page, I don’t remember the exact text) that this is the time when we are called to live in the highest spiritual tension, to go through fire and burn white. Mircea Vulcănescu had to go through all these trials, which he felt and foresaw many years before. […]

Some consider Mircea Vulcănescu a “sterile nature” because he didn’t write 20-30 famous works. My opinion is that he could have written them, but he was not interested in doing so. He had neither the vanity, nor the ambition, nor the pride to be printed at any price. He felt, perhaps like the sages, that his other purpose was to pass on by word of mouth some of the knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire and the revelations he had experienced. When he gave a talk, he would speak for two or three hours. It was like a waterfall. He would almost exhaust the subject he was developing. So I heard him speak at the Dalles Hall about Leon Bloy, about Ernest Hello, or at the Foundation, taking part in discussions at the Criterion Symposia. One left culturally enriched, spiritually enchanted, as rarely happens when one reads books. […]

Shortly before his death he was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Finance, as a technician, not as a politician, in rather difficult circumstances for the country.

I met him by chance in the street (I think it was around 1943) and while we were chatting about one thing or another, I told him that the author of the novel “Interior”, Constantin Fîntîneru, had become nervous for various reasons and had been admitted to hospital. When I went to see him, he complained that he had been treated barbarically and that he was having a hard time with money. Mircea Vulcănescu asked me to go to the Ministry and collect 8,000 lei for the poor man. I did so and brought the money to the sick man, not from the Writers’ Union, but from the Ministry of Finance. I found Fîntîneru taken out of the hospital room and made the hospital librarian. 

A proof that Mircea Vulcănescu was not only a man of astonishing intellectual and spiritual presence, but also a golden soul. […]

Mircea Vulcănescu was a man of rare intellectual and spiritual probity, without any moral compromise, an honest seeker of truth, free of vanity and pride, with the fear of God. He was careful to be fair to everyone, he loved his fellow men, he was sober without ceasing to be affectionate, he knew how to talk for hours, but he also knew how to listen. He spoke like the wise man he was.

I am transcribing a speech given by Mircea Vulcănescu on 20 February 1934: “Raised in abnormal times and formed in the tension of these times, our generation is not made for normal times. There is something unnatural in it, something that does not fit into roundness and measure!

Broken by the circumstances of its formation, our generation still bears the marks of the upheaval in which it was born.

It is only comfortable in tension. Forced to live everyday life, the younger generation falls apart, disintegrates, loses itself. Every moment of relaxation seems to them to be a fall from grace!

Their lives are nothing more than a preparation for the great moments for which they are given everything. Her life is divided, as Peguy said, into “epochs” and “periods”.

The periods are intermediate periods in which nothing happens and which have no other meaning than to serve as a preparation for the “epochs” that follow.

It is in such a time that my generation lives today, available and scattered in anticipation of the epoch.

The “epoch” may not come, and then we will all be losers in terms of our social smallness.

But when the time comes, when the nation calls upon us, I firmly believe that our generation will be a great generation.

It may be a mere whim, born of the need I mentioned at the beginning, to attach ourselves to a face that surpasses us, to wish ourselves higher than we are.

It may well be!

But it is for the clocks that I speak now.

To the hours when we will be tested by life to the marrow!

For the hours when we will burn white!

Then, that is, who shall stand!

In those hours we will recognise ourselves and demand the right to be human. The right to be able, at last, to say to a reality that astonishes us, the words that Correggio once said to Raphael’s canvases”.

This prediction, together with the prophetic accents it contains, make Mircea Vulcănescu’s testimony a testimony that should enlighten our own vision, because we want the good of this long-suffering country. With humility and patience, with a chivalrous spirit, but also with a spirit of sacrifice, with love above all, Vulcănescu left a document that should serve as a guideline to be followed for the good of the Romanian people.

(Arșavir Acterian – Portraits and Three Memories of a Prisoner, 2nd edition, Ararat Publishing House, Bucharest, 2004, pp. 155-158,182-183; partial republication in Intelectualitatea interbelică entre ortodoxie e tradiționalism, edited by Fabian Anton, Vremea Publishing House, Bucharest, 2008, pp. 55-60)