Confession of a writer and doctor

Many of the things you ask me to tell you are not only impossible to share, they are mysteries to me. Although they are mine, I feel they are inaccessible. My religious verses are less than a hint of these mysterious realities, just as a map shows the world instead of real mountains or waters, and translates heights into figures. We can only understand each other through sympathy and identity of inner experience!

You ask me to tell you about faith, at least my faith!

Gentlemen, I was born on the shores of great waters and found that I could swim. I can tell you all the ways of swimming, but about swimming itself I could not articulate a single valid word to you. How could I teach you that total fusion of body and water, that definitive instinct of safety that transforms diving into floating, that rhythm of breath softened by the wave, with the opening of the chest at an angle that no mechanic in the world could determine? You ask me about faith and its lyrical intoxication, about art and faith? I will answer you about swimming: the bigger and louder the gestures in the water, the weaker, the more uncertain, the closer the swimmer is to drowning. Unconsciously, beginners make the most disorderly, noisy and pompous gestures with their arms and legs… The perfect swim is done without thinking, it’s unwise. You float, almost submerged in the water, hardly moving… That’s what long-distance swimming is, serious swimming in the sea and ocean…

True faith is similar to the instinct of silent and gentle floating, it is like this unfailing surrender to the power of the water, of sinking and holding on thanks to the grace of a silent breath, thanks to an inhalation of air that you suck in in a moment, from above, to take it with you to the bottom… Faith is an instinct of rhythm and orientation that cannot be expressed in words, however great they may be.

Gentlemen, forgive me, but our religious poems, these verbal gestures, are as far from the depths of faith as children wallowing in an ankle-deep puddle are from real swimming. If they are truly great and heart-rending, the gestures of art can at best be the testimony of a dramatic drowning, as happened to all the Romantics. The links between art and faith are ancient bonds of pure dependence. Art has not revealed itself. Art has always served faith in all religions. But since art has emancipated itself, since art itself has become a religion that requires its believers to serve it alone, to be only its rites and forms, since then it can no longer serve two masters. To make pure art is to betray pure faith. The only true religious inspiration that can still unite art and faith is prayer… But even the highest prayer, as you know, is uttered silently, with the lips of the soul.

Gentlemen, these days I have seen again my verses, the testimony of my religious conscience, which drag me before you today as before a tribunal. I am not going to rehearse here the trial that I myself have brought against my poetry, nor the trial of my literary conscience, which, like the ball on the edge of the roulette wheel, has slipped and is still staggering, and before whose style and forms it has come to a definitive halt… This time I would like to take a different path, to go deeper into the heart of the matter for you and, if possible, to unravel together the unshakeable foundations of faith on which the games on our surface are built and played.

Gentlemen, I consider faith to be an organic quality, a temperament, a particular crystallisation of our life. Of course, it is much more difficult to establish faces and categories in the spiritual order than in the psychological and biological. Muscles, bones, lung capacity, vital index, nervous reactions, minor and major passions, the abilities with which we are born, all give us this cut, imprint us with certain bio-psychic forms and place us in certain types, more or less happy. You have heard of the two basic types of man that the scholars have stopped at: one is the little picnic type and the other is the athletic type, with all the other half-breeds in between.

I would recognise in the spirit at least two types, two characters: faithfulness and infidelity – picnism and spiritual athleticism. With a whole range of mixtures between them.

Faithfulness has the same moral status as character. I don’t know if it will ever be known what biological and psychological structures these spiritual structures of fidelity and infidelity contain. I confess these things as my own fantasies, though I feel or sense them as very real…

Gentlemen, I have no merit to believe, I was born this way! I search all my past and find no event to make me believe, no misfortune to turn me upside down, no suffering to turn me inside out like a glove, no alchemical fire to melt me and then transform me into another metal. If I have sometimes stopped believing, it has been quietly, for I often forget to breathe when I am too absorbed in a work. But suddenly the need for air makes my chest expand again, unconsciously and unwillingly. I think I was born a devout man, organically devout, and I dare say devout even if I were not religious. God is simple for those who grasp him at once… You’ve seen the long and complicated calculations that have to be made to explain to some people a problem that others intuitively understand! The famous Inodi, almost an idiot, suddenly found the square root of a number with dozens of digits with a simple mental calculation… Blessed are those who do not need mystical or religious logarithms to find God. How simple faith is! Ladies, forgive me for being so bold, but I would add this to the happiness of the mountain: happy are those who are born faithful. Of such a one the Lord said through the mouth of the Psalmist: “I chose you from your mother’s womb”. Once again, no pitiful struggle, with the world or with myself, has tested my faith.

Far be it from me to say that faith is hereditary. It is all the more precious for those who acquire it later, through struggle and practice, after great trials and efforts, just as on the physical plane the Japanese, dwarfs, through education, have become a race of Japanese athletes, thanks to a special diet and physical practice.

But most of us are naturally born loyal types, and only modern, Faustian education diverts us from the primitive type: while it urbanises our bodies, it changes our minds. Gentlemen, I do not know if it is right to repeat all the platitudes that accompany confessions of this kind. I was born in the country, which I consider to be the greatest happiness of my life. My parents, simple people, were pious, of unshakable faith, never wavering or doubting. Moderate practitioners, without habotnicity, religion was, however, the prayer rule, the encyclopaedia of their practical life. In our house they read a lot, especially religious and ritual books, the Bible with the Old and New Testaments. I still have psalters and clocks from those days, with Cyrillic letters, the meaning of which I learnt by playing the holy bucoavne, and my mother and father, like all country people, were great lovers of reading, especially reading aloud, as in the pew. As soon as we were a little older, we would go round the children to read to them.

But we lived an authentic country life, with the rhythm of the seasons, dictated by nature, but based on customs and ancient traditions.

As far back as I can discover myself, almost beyond the horizon of memory, I see myself as a little child, sitting alone in a clearing of wild flowers, at the edge of a gorge… It’s neither poetry nor prose… It’s the truth. I’m alone, at the bottom of our garden of a few bushes, which seemed huge to me at the time… I’m sitting on a bench of flowers, looking into the distance, and I still feel the happiness of that childlike solitude, filled with a great, inexpressible, one might say mystical expectation. I was waiting then for something that I am waiting for now, something that would fulfil a longing that I had never dreamed of, and I was waiting then with certainty that it would come… I felt, I thought, that I was predestined. I was told that I was born with a horse in my hair, that I’d be lucky… My mother adored me. My sisters loved me, I was a miracle to everyone. I was a child of no more than three years, sitting among dandelions and wild flax, with a blue sky above me and a range of blue mountains below me, dreaming of destiny and happy in anticipation. What was I waiting for? Angels, God and St. Peter, St. Sunday from the fairy tales in my head, of course there was a copy in that curly baby, something borrowed from the fairy tale too, gold, weapons, horses, realms beyond. But there was a certainty in me that a dream I had never formulated, and never had formulated, would come true. I think that even at the moment of my death I shall not lose this clear and mystical feeling, about which I cannot be mistaken: the feeling of a happy child on a bank of flowers, under a blue sky, in a mysterious garden, waiting for something even more wonderful. Was I reliving the Edenic experience? Was I once again the first nostalgic for paradise? Certainly, my feeling then was religious, and today, when I go far away from home, my favourite place is still there, at the bottom of the garden, now poor in flowers, with the whole horizon narrowed, the same great expectation hanging over me… It’s the tripod of the Sibilei in me, gripped like oracles by reveries and expectations. A waiting from the north, from the mountains. And I stay there until dusk gathers its peacock’s tail from the Panata ridge – and the lighthouse dawns in the sky.

Later, this expectation descended from the heavens into the earth: I became a passionate treasure hunter, not for the treasure itself, but to fulfil my prophesied destiny.

Of all my readings, the Bible impressed me most, with its stark grandeur of drama, half earthly and half divine. My favourite god was Jehovah, whose understanding of the persecution of the enemy – the protection of the elect – I coveted. To this day I remain a Jehovist in the uncharted depths of my faithful feelings. The Son followed, gentle and obedient, hand in hand with the Holy Mother. She is perhaps also the icon of the Father’s authority, without a shadow of a doubt in our home ever since. My favourite saints, besides the archangels, especially the fiery Michael, were Abram, Isaac and Jacob, and like them I slept with my head on the stone, waiting under the ague at the bottom of the garden for the angel to fight. With Samuel I pricked up my ear to hear the voice of the Lord. I have fought the Philistines with Samson, sung with David, watched the sheep and wept with the prophets. I knew the Old Testament through and through, like an epos, so that the idyllic gospel remained in the shadows for me until late in life.

But what I think helped to strengthen the temperament I was born with, and which was not much thwarted by circumstances, was the country life of early childhood. The dates that were woven into the wreath of the year and that we looked forward to and practised as great and precious spectacles. Our most cherished theatre was the liturgy and religious service every Sunday and feast day, especially after we had discovered the hidden meaning of all liturgical gestures. More delightful than any opera gala I have seen since, I have always loved the Easter denials, with the great and wonderful Friday when we sang the Proclamation. Months before, I had learnt it with my mother, without fail. The detour to the church, the triumphal service of the Resurrection, indelibly sealed a memory that I never wanted to lose. They are indelible emotions, the intensity of which I still feel in my memory. Our soul, at least in childhood, unconsciously captures God on its sensitive plate. Religious practices, worship, make the face of God appear and become fixed in the consciousness, just as the manipulations in various reagents help the captured faces to appear on the photographic plate. Thus the mysterious impregnation remains purely negative or is erased – I see myself on a bright day, with my elder sister by my hand, walking on the road out of the village. Above me, in the greenish sky, a huge angel, like a Pantocrator Christ on the vault of the church… I asked my sister, who didn’t remember and thought I was dreaming. But my impression was as strong and vivid as if I had had a vision. I ask myself again if I ran across the garden to my mother, who was at war, to tell her, with astonishment and a little frightened joy, that the little tattered five-penny book, the Letter of Our Lady, which had fallen from heaven and which I had in my breast pocket, was fluttering there, flickering like a life, giving me a sign. Gentlemen, if I hadn’t become a doctor, I’d have been a priest… My favourite game was to play church – not a monkey, nor a mockery, but a real and sincere childish practice of the great mysteries. We could have played anything else, why baptise only the priority lambs in the yard? Under a huge walnut tree we had the church and the altar behind curtains. The bells were our branches. My mother herself sometimes agreed to come to the service and listen to me. In those days they brought out hundreds of baby birds. And many of them died… Do you think any of them died unceremoniously, without a funeral or without being buried? Pit after pit, dug with garden hoes, were the graves of the mourning chicks, all with crosses of sticks on their heads, and not just once, but for summers and years. I remember the grief that came to us one wintry autumn when a few hundred swallows died, trapped in the snow and sheltered in the attic, in the eaves, around the house. All of them died, but all of them had funerals, I would have thought it a great pity if they had not.

The memory of the swallows buried in the soil of my childhood still raises wings in my soul.

All this was a treasure that I spent and lived on after leaving home, from the age of 6, in schools, among strangers. For exams, I prayed and knelt before icons until my first classes at high school. For a long time I consoled myself with tears reading the Psalter I carried with me, appropriating all the demands of David. Little by little, however, the impressions were covered with the dust of the cities, and I forgot the faith. There was no apostasy, no silence, no struggle. I went through scientific studies and all the customs of materialism only with my mind, not with my soul. Even socialism, which was all-encompassing at the time, had to put on a sentimental garment, populism, for me to adhere to it. Gentlemen, I was no longer religious, no longer a Christian, but still with Felix Dantec and other illustrious atheists, I was neither pagan nor atheist. I remained a believer by temperament. A sense of orientation of a religious nature carried me through life even then. I had no crisis of faith. And slowly the expectation that I had at first expressed in different terms, now intellectual, not mystical, took hold of me again.

Instinct led me to philosophy and metaphysics. Since high school I had been reading works on psychology and morality. I soon came to Schopenhauer, and I don’t regret it. He led me to Upanisade and Buda. From my first years of literature, psychophysics and psychopathology, beyond Sergius, Wundt and Hofding, led me to medicine, following in the footsteps of Vaschide, Pierre Janet and William James with his religious experience.

But even in medicine the same forgetfulness of faith: neither under the muscles, nor under the crust of the brain, nor in the hospital patient was God. Study is so mechanised in the nerve, so petty in the cell, so deadly in the clinical sign, that the truth, the first sick man is the one you meet after school. Gentlemen, social life, with its responsibilities and its hardships, has again begun to overthrow the old, almost forgotten instinct. I had sat on a seashore and made fingerprints in the sand. But the years of study were over. Life threw me into the sea and I had to swim. Married now, with children, trapped in a mountain net that tightened like a noose 60 km long and 60 wide, I began to pull my head out of the water and gasp for breath. It was the only way I could keep my head above water. I waved my hands violently, I flailed, I mean, I wrote things that are fortunately lost today.

I threw myself at everything that, at the time, and I’m more than 30 years old, tempted a faith weaned and scientifically nourished, materialist, positivist, evolutionist mind. Littre, Claude Bernard, Auguste Comte, Darwin, Spencer. In the beginning of the world, I said with them, there was God, as in the beginning of the tree there was the seed. But who else seeks the seed in the telluric chaos from which the trunk sprang? G-d stands high in the fruit of our branches. Away, that is, with the pomp and the archive of divine cosmogony. But my branches remained barren. Disgruntled, I left and turned to my enemies. I got to know the Kabala through studies, especially those of Frank and Karpe, I read the Sefer with its commentaries, I practised on the Rosicrucians of Peladan, I researched the enlightenment of the unknown philosopher, I dwelt for a long time on Theosophy, from Gnosis to Pista Sofia, through Fabre d’Olivet. Saint Yves D’Alveidre, Eliphas Levy and Papus, to the modern Schure, Rudolf Steiner, M-me Blawatzky, Annie Besant and many others.

But I have not joined any secret society, I have not joined any sect and I am not an initiate, for fear of restricting my freedom. I felt that nowhere could I be freer than in God. He is man’s only freedom.

I rejected spiritualism from the beginning, both the radical spiritualism of Alan Kardec and the pseudo-scientific spiritualism of Crooks.

With emotion I cultivated Carly, Emerson and through them Novalis, I became enthusiastic about Maeterlinck and then turned to Plato and the neo-Platonists.

I confess that I was interested in this preview, and I was as happy as if I had walked through a closed gallery of stained glass windows. You pass through a strip of mournful yellow, enter another of fiery red, and step into a third of mystical violet.

But in the end I longed for the white light, the real light, and stepped outside with my eyes fixed on the sky. These colours were just qualities of it, not the essential Light. Some of this study and transmigration is reflected in my poetry. You see, like on a gambling table, the ball of my mind would wobble on the edge of each number. But the ball didn’t stop. It resisted the temperamental tilt of the table, the organic foundation of the composition. Faith carried me on to that place without number from which there was no return.

Gentlemen, the surest and most unnoticed expectation with which the horizon of my childhood opened to me, and which will close the horizon of my life from here, is, I believe, the expectation of God, who, though hidden, is not unknown to me. I wait for him. And the supreme adventure that inspires the dream and the fairy tale of a life is that he will come.

I will not conceal from you that science may interpret this return to faith as an involution, a return to the primitive mentality of uncivilised man. As a weakening and an eclipse of the higher functions of the brain, overtaken by the rebellion of the subordinate, inner functions which are under the bark and which have taken over the helm. Ancient magical complexes, ancient repressions, James Williams’ science respected them and recognised their powerful sacred reality… much like Freud’s science today. But it is not because of the scientific curiosity of physiological psychology that we have discovered our souls here. If they had not been listened to by each of you with the emotion of your own confession, in the identity of feeling and sincerity, these confessions would be ridiculous childishness for you, and useless profanations for me.

What I can tell you, in conclusion, is that my scientific training, my medical studies, my knowledge of philosophy and all my achievements in other fields of culture, art and literature, instead of distancing me, have brought me closer to the faith. One way or another, I might have been a naive atheist, a negative simplist. The more multifaceted I was, the more room I had for complex experiences, new points of view, the interference of doctrines, the possibility of comparison, more light. And above all, the synthesis that faith must necessarily be at the basis of the normal human mind. Because it is a sad one-sidedness to live in a space with only one moral dimension, to live, for example, only in joy or only in pain. Life is multidimensional. To the two lower, earthly dimensions, I would call them passionate dimensions – joy and pain – to which materialism is limited, we must add a third height, the dimension of spirituality… and by transfiguring ourselves we enter the fourth metaphysical dimension, ecstasy and holiness. But only in faith can we build for ourselves a space of life beyond the crawling, designed with the dimensions of depth and height in infinity.

(Vasile Voiculescu, confession delivered to the students of Theology in Bucharest – Gândirea Magazine, Year XIV, no. 8, October 1935, pp. 400-405)