Alice Voinescu, the embodiment of culture as a lifestyle, as a virtue

Tomorrow’s historian of the country’s decline today, the one who will serenely situate the phases of Romania’s cruel metamorphosis, this whole night seism, will be forced to weigh well – to give – to give – to believe what is fatal – but he will also have to capture those areas of readiness in which resignation, the will to powerlessness, active cowardice have been sown. The university, unfortunately, is one of these. Not a few of our academics find themselves in the chosen place of dishonesty and insincerity. And not from the eleventh hour – the evil hour that is hard to relate to – but from the very beginning. From the evil dawn. From the dawn of the dawn.

We are not necessarily thinking of Mihai Ralea – who surprises absolutely nobody – but of people suspected of being serious: Iorgu Iordan, G. Oprescu, Tudor Vianu, Al. Rosetti, Andrei Oțetea and even G. Călinescu.

Tomorrow’s historian will have to be doubled by a sociologist – there is a sociology of intellectual over-curiosity – in order to situate as accurately as possible what happened in the Romanian university. (We are talking about the humanities, of course, because techniques and sciences rarely involve consciousness, as the events of the 20th century have shown).

In modern Romanian history, the chair has become associated with responsibility and humanity, with the demand for truth. Titu Maiorescu, Bogdan-Petriceicu Hașdeu, Al. Xenopol, Vasile Pârvan, Ovid Densușianu, Nicolae Iorga, C. Rădulescu-Motru, C. Stere, Lucian Blaga – and I have not mentioned them all – made the university the creative bridge between faith and life, so necessary for a new state like ours, which had to become contemporary with modern societies without losing either its antiquity or its substance. And if at times there have been injustices, as in any human institution – the omission of E. Lovinescu or C. Noica, for example – it is no less true that the University has almost always lived up to its purpose.

“A teacher’s first duty is to give up his independence, his dignity, if he does not want to be told to his face that he has forgotten his school,” warned Ovid Densusianu long before the catastrophe. But the noble teacher’s warning is not enough for his descendants to ‘forget’. It is not only the school that they have forgotten: they have forgotten their nation, their spirit, their face.

In today’s university, they perform the solemn or the ashen deception, depending on the person or the time. The professors I have mentioned – because we are not interested in those who have been educated or anointed by the Communist Party – instead of trying to resist the new dogmas of lies and hypocrisy, they play the role of the damned, with a vocation that was unthinkable yesterday, in the chair-lecture. Few, very few “heretics” in our universities! In a communist regime, “heresy” carries great risks. It exists in Warsaw, in Budapest, even in East Berlin, but it is hard to imagine it in Bucharest.

And yet, alongside the orthodoxy of obedience of some Iorgu Iordan, Oprescu, Vianu and others like them, we must mark as a triumph of Romanian dignity the martyrdom of Gheorghe Brătianu, Dragoș Protopopescu, Mircea Vulcănescu and Alice Voinescu, who died recently after remaining completely silent during the last fifteen years of the moral pulverisation of our university. An exemplary silence, an implacable silence, not broken by shortcomings, threats or even imprisonment. Alice Voinescu is one of those – few – who understood culture not only as an intellectual dowry, but also as a way of life, as a virtue. Culture as a virtue implies, first of all, the courage to defend one’s values, not to rent them to political (or, in the case of communist regimes, police) temporality; it implies sacrifice as a limit. Between courage and sacrifice lies unquestioning loyalty to the values defended. Loyalty constantly checks this courage, which thus becomes renewal and action. Courage is brave in the Platonic sense of fidelity: Alice Voinescu embodied it in a kind of humble asceticism, with a simplicity worthy of ancient wisdom.

In our culture, the place occupied by Alice Voinescu is not an important one, a place of necessarily original creation, of rebellious achievement. All her writings, however, reveal an effort to situate the great problems of the time in such a way as to serve Romanian spirituality in depth, sparing it – as far as possible – from leaps into the void, from premature dogmatic stages, from hasty narcissisms, but also from frivolous cosmopolitan openings. Alongside these spiritual cautions, there is a moral reserve, a dimension of sobriety and critical serenity that necessarily censors the bold and the unmeasured, but also the habitual, the predictable, the stiff gesture. We are faced with an essential pedagogy that is appeased: sufficiency and fever are banished as out of place.

We should remember from the outset that Maiorescu’s influence on Alice Voinescu’s philosophical attitude is evident in this choice of the colour of truth. Moreover, Alice Voinescu herself – in her conversations with the writer Ion Biberi (Lumea de mâine, Forum, pp.97-110) – places Maiorescu’s presence at the forefront of her education. Stressing the decisive role played by the Romanian university environment (Alice Voinescu also quotes Coco Dumitrescu, Pompiliu Eliade, Nicolae Iorga, C. Rădulescu-Motru), she recounts the following scene, precisely to underline the emotional bonds between teachers and students:

“I was at the end of a year of studies, in a deep state of exhaustion. I felt empty of soul and unable to make the final effort to take the exam for the second part of my degree at Onciul. I decided to postpone it until autumn. It was a painful but necessary decision. It was in this state that I met Maiorescu, who appreciated me and asked me about my academic situation. I showed him the impasse I was in. The professor paused for a moment and then began to point out the shortcomings of my decision. I must be free in spirit for the summer. I must not declare myself defeated. I must fight, prove to myself that I am determined. Then, with a tremor in his voice for fear of being misunderstood, he said: “Do you realise that giving up would be a lack of style?

This admonition inspired me. I began my studies with determination and took the exam. On the morning of the exam, at 8 o’clock, Maiorescu entered the room where we candidates were sitting, together with Onciul, who was cautiously inquiring about the purpose of Maiorescu’s visit. The latter replied with a smile that he had come to pay him a simple courtesy call. I then understood the professor’s discretion in avoiding informing Onciul of my true state of mind and in wanting to encourage me by his presence. I was deeply touched by the professor’s confidence and the moral help he offered me with such delicacy. When I left, he congratulated me on the result and added, with a friendly smile and a wag of his finger, “Miss Steriade, Miss Steriade, I think that next time you will be more determined and that you won’t force an old teacher like me, who has other duties, to attend your exam at 8 o’clock in the morning? “

Other great teachers, this time foreigners, had their influence on him. Firstly, the French psychologist G. Dumas, but above all the environment of the Marburg School. Alice Voinescu dedicated her doctoral thesis to the head of this school, Herman Cohen, which she wrote in Paris with Levi-Bruhl and which was presented to the French Institute by Victor Delbos. (In the third volume of the History of Modern Philosophy, published in 1938 by the Romanian Philosophical Society, Alice Voinescu will be the one who presents the Marburg School with her undeniable competence in the chapter on Neo-Kantianism). Abroad, Alice Voinescu experiences the pleasure of meeting people, ideas and landscapes. In Marburg, when she was not listening to lectures on Plato and Kant, she went to Professor Cohen’s house, where once a week they made music and discussed philosophy and literature with teachers from Halle. She becomes the spoiled mistress of the family of the philosopher Nartop and befriends Niculai Hartman. Alice Voinescu had previously been to Leipzig, where she had listened to Lipps, Lamprecht and Volkelt. Then, in 1928, she attended the famous Potigny meetings with Gide, Martin du Gard, Grothuisen, Charles du Bos and Francois Mauriac.

Significantly, in contact with the great European spirits and the seductive forms of the West, Alice Voinescu – instead of being cut off from the horizons of the country and experiencing the easy temptations of uprooting, exile has shown us some unthought-of spiritual and moral mutations – remains herself, as if even closer to the Romanian duration. And when Professor Cohen expressed his concern that her Orthodox religion might lead her to crises of conscience when she approached the substance of her thought, Alice Voinescu replied with this calm but firm certainty: “Mr. Professor, I am quite well established in my faith”. And on another occasion, when she visited the Oxford group, Alice Voinescu discovered even more precisely the orthodox tone of her religiosity:

“There, in Oxford, I had a clearer awareness of my Orthodoxy than ever before. It’s a strange thing. I was able to share in the deep religious contemplation of a huge audience of over 700 people – lords, chauffeurs, ordinary people. They were in the same ecstasy. I was captivated by the depth of the moment, but inside I was crying for the Orthodox Church. Of course, there may be disorder and neglect in our Church, but it’s ours; our Church has warmth, even if you don’t find Catholic order and solemnity at Mass; our Church speaks more to our soul. Since then I have become a practising Orthodox and I have never missed a Mass”.

Faith is a step conquered by the philosopher, or rather by the lover of wisdom. The path to God is a path of concentric growth, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the rational to the supernatural, but not to the irrational (Alice Voinescu’s horror of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is exaggerated). Her worldview is based on Platonic thought, overlaid by the alluvial soil of Kantian rigour, which in turn is overwhelmed by the divine – diligent, lucid – reconciliation that refuses the mystical leap. “I am a believer, but not a mystic,” says Alice Voinescu, perhaps too clearly. “I love earthly life, reality. I’m convinced that if you don’t live your life deeply, you create a gap in the Absolute”.

This confession quickly reveals Professor Alice Voinescu’s passion for Montaigne, whom she discovered in her thirties but to whom she devoted an excellent monograph much later, in 1936. Alice Voinescu decided to write a study on this “great, sober and enlightened friend” when an otherwise very learned student condemned the old “essayist”. Deeply disturbed by the audacity of a young man to attack the eternally young Montaigne, Alice Voinescu asked herself: “Is not all the risk that moves the conscience to action between desire and duty?” The result is not long in coming: Alice Voinescu dedicates her Montaigne “to all those who, determined to honour the truth not only with bold thoughts but also with the humble deeds of everyday life, have the audacity to dispense with easy judgments gleaned from uncontrolled rumours, be they about people or causes. (There is a wonderful lesson in the motivation of Alice Voinescu’s decision to publish such a book for the Romanian intellectual adolescence, which has led to some recklessness, often mistaken for originality). […]

Alice Voinescu was very active not only in philosophy – her articles in the Revista de filozofie should not be forgotten – but also in theatre. Her reviews in the magazine of the Royal Foundations, her lectures at the Conservatory, her volume Aspects of Contemporary Theatre (Royal Foundations, 1941), a study on Aeschylus (Royal Foundations, 1946) show her passion for this art. Strangely enough, there are philosophers who are not content with making theatre, but who retreat into the narrow confines of “dramatic chronicle”. […]

In the preface to Aspects of Contemporary Theatre, Alice Voinescu explains at length her concept – a philosophical concept that owes something to Bergsonian aesthetics – of the deep roots of theatre. For her, theatre has always had the quality of inaugurating a sui generis temporality: “Just as ingenious architecture creates the essential and qualitative space out of the amorphous environment of the place, so drama creates time, which is not a succession of fragmentary states of consciousness, but the dynamic unity of consciousness itself, the permanent actuality of an integral consciousness; and if one speaks of a conquest of time by drama, it must not be understood, as in the other arts, as an exit from time, but as a transfiguration of time”. By creating not the present but the actual, drama, according to Alice Voinescu, embodies the primary vocation of the theatre, which is to seal the victory of the eternal over the ephemeral. In a process of pan-essentiality (which – as far as we are concerned – we do not appropriate, but only describe), Alice Voinescu believes that “only drama defeats the transitory”, the ephemeral, “by creating an eternity” – “The action of the dramatic hero – she continues – far from being a copy of our gestures, which tend towards heterogeneous ends, is – on the contrary – the generation of consciousness, since it is no longer a state, but the creative movement itself. The mortal leap made by consciousness from what man is to what he must be, this tension, in itself, apart from the conditions in which it moves, is pure dynamism and constitutes what we call spirituality”.

(Virgil Ierunca – Românește, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2005, pp. 53-62)