Dr. Voiculescu – a presence of gentleness and intellectual elegance
Dr. Vasile Voiculescu [has] risen among us, at the “liturgical” Antim[1], since very early 1946. Beyond the prestige recognised to a cultural personality, we discovered the man closely, in his presence of gentleness and intellectual elegance. Originally from the region of Buzău (“a family of not very well-off Bohemians…”), his early faith had never faded, but according to his own confession, the turbulence of life and the opacity of the ecclesiastical institution had pushed it to the margins of his conscience. A classic situation: perhaps that is why the spontaneous and free community of Antim – “laity” and “clergy” – revived him from the depths. Here, for the first time, he has shared with us his literary revivals – the fantastic novels – and the unsuspected Shakespearean sonnets, annotated with the original. […]
His personal library, a vast ‘cathedral’ carefully built up over the years, ordered as if for a well-considered giddiness, offered us fairytale new discoveries. […]
He was arrested in the same library, between one and two past midnight, on 4 and 5 August 1958, at the age of 74[2]. His detention was often a cruel and senseless ordeal. The final stain: the authorities’ attempt to “get him back” after his release from prison. Exceptionally, almost unbelievably in those places and circumstances, at the trial of the “Burning Bush”, before a full court, one voice rose to denounce the stupidity of his arrest and conviction: it was the voice of Alexandru Mironescu.
(Andrei Scrima – The Time of the Burning Bush. The Spiritual Master in the Eastern Tradition, 2nd edition, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2000, pp. 133-134)
[1] We mean participation in vespers or feast days. (n. ed.)
[2] He was sitting at the table, in spite of the late hour, with an old edition of Swedenborg before him. There lay, between the printed lines, a paraphrased version in Romanian. The brave – rather ungrammatical – guard, faced with the duty of inventing the corpus delicti, resigned himself to recording: ‘a German book by Swenburg’. (ed.)