Ernest Bernea and the “incense monastery”
Whoever reads “Space, Time and Causality in the Romanian People” or Ernest Bernea’s essays contained in “An Appeal to Simplicity” or “Dialectics of the Modern Mind”, feels the refinement and depth of thought, the balance of judgement, the sensitivity with which he “feels” every tremor of the problem he tackles, the good nature that radiates from every line he writes. Reading him and studying his life, one is reminded of the image of the “monastery of incense” in Romanian fairy tales, a place of purity and perfection.
Born in Focșani on 28 March 1905, Ernest Bernea grew up in Băila. His father, Marcu, was a Moldavian peasant from the outskirts of Galați who became a storekeeper in the port of Brăila, and his mother, Tudora, a housewife, was the daughter of an Ardean settled on the banks of the Danube. His harsh childhood, spent in a working-class neighbourhood, left a lasting impression on him. For the rest of his life, he was content to live an austere, even impoverished life. In an ironic twist of history, Bernea was classified as a “petit bourgeois” in the Securitate files under the heading “social origin”!
The First World War hit the Bernea family hard. The eldest son died on the front, the father fell seriously ill, and little Ernest was taken in and brought up for a time in Botoșani as a child of the troops. Returning to Brăila, Ernest Bernea, the eldest of his siblings, had to work from an early age to help his mother and four brothers. He sold pretzels, worked as a port attendant, as a lumberjack and as a mathematics tutor for the children of wealthy families. His final years at school were spent privately in Tecuci, where he only went to take his exams so that he had time to work.
Part of the inter-war cultural elite
After finishing secondary school, Ernest Bernea enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest in 1926. It was here that he became close to Nae Ionescu, a contributor to “Cuvântul”, and above all to Dimitrie Gusti, a member of the famous Gusti ethnographic research teams. It is from this period that the personality of the scholar is formed, a rare synthesis of sociologist, ethnologist and philosopher, unique in Romanian culture.
Between 1930 and 1932, Ernest Bernea received a scholarship and specialised in sociology and religious history in Paris and in philosophy in Freiburg (Germany) (where he studied with Martin Heidegger).
In the autumn of 1932, Bernea met Maria Patrichi (Marcela), a graduate of the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, whom he married five years later. They had a son, Horia, and twins, Ana and Tudora. It was Maria who bore the brunt of the family’s suffering during the years when her husband was exiled or arrested, and she died in 1965 from a cruel illness.
Back in the country, he worked at the Romanian Social Institute, directed by Dimitrie Gusti, and made a valuable contribution to monographic research in the different areas of Romania, publishing important studies and articles in specialised journals. During the same period, Bernea also worked as a librarian at Professor Gusti’s Sociology Department at the University. Noticed by Professor Simion Mehedinți, Ernest Bernea was appointed assistant at the Department of Anthropogeography, where he taught Comparative Sociology and the first course in Ethnology in Romania, and also became vice-president of the Society of Geography Students “Soveja”.
“Rânduiala Magazine”
In 1935, Bernea formally joined the Legionary Movement, working in the “Axa” nest led by Mihail Polihroniade. This decision was facilitated by the fact that many of his collaborators and friends were already Legionaries or sympathisers, such as Professor Mehedinți, Traian Herseni, Ion Ionică, Ion Samarineanu and D.C. Amzăr (who was also his brother-in-law).
With the latter three, he founded the magazine “Rânduiala”, which was published quarterly for three years. A highly respected publication, to which illustrious writers such as Lucian Blaga, Radu Gyr and Haig Acterian contributed, “Rânduiala” was not a political or propagandistic magazine, but was part of the general tendency of the “young generations” of the time to identify, highlight and promote Romanian cultural genius. Like other contemporary writers, the “Rânduiala” writers searched for these values in the world of the village, but not on a philosophical, speculative level, but on the basis of interdisciplinary field research. Bernea now defines his concept of the archaic Romanian rural world as a naturally grown and cohesive community of life which, in the harsh historical conditions our nation has gone through, has actually become the repository of our authentic values. This world had long since begun to crumble, but Bernea believed that in certain places “the Romanian village still lives an unaltered, harmonious and balanced life, rich in traditional values, as a pure product of the land and local history“. Looking at the realities of the Romanian village “with love (for without love there can be no science)” can give us a glimpse of a possible model of Romanian being. The main values identified by Bernea in this complex intellectual excursion are simplicity, order and awareness of the presence of the sacred, as well as a way of life in which man is naturally integrated into the world, the cosmos and the Absolute. This integrative vision has often earned him the label of “mystic”, which would have been a millstone around his neck during the years of communism.
The approach and separation from the Legionary Movement
In addition to this editorial project, Bernea also published a series of political pamphlets, which attracted many people at the time and earned him the label of “doctrinaire of the Legionary Movement”. Reading these pamphlets proves what has been said about Bernea, that he was a “mystic lost in politics”, when in fact he was trying to propose a profound moral transformation of the Romanian society, which no political force could really put into practice. Asked in the 1955 inquiry why he had joined the Legionary Movement and written those pamphlets, Ernest Bernea replied: “The fact that led me to join the Legionary Movement was that I believed that this political organisation was fighting for the moralisation of public life… The main principles of the Legionary Movement were: the national principle, the principle of social justice, anti-Semitism, the moralisation of public life, the Christian life… With regard to the national principle, I was not in favour of an exclusivist position based on the idea of the right to life of every people. I was in complete agreement with the principle of social justice. As for anti-Semitism, I opposed it as a consequence of the racist thesis. I accepted the principle of moralisation of public life. I accepted the principle of Christian life from a moral point of view and not as a mystical principle in politics, by which I meant that politics is the art of governing in a relative and historical sense and not dogmatic or fanatical… When I joined the Legionary ovement, from a practical point of view, I noticed many differences in ideas and methods that distanced me from the Movement. For example, I did not agree with the violence practised in the Legionary Movement and with racism in general (anti-Semitism). I also disagreed with paramilitarism and the confusion between politics and mysticism… The confusion I found… was that they were proceeding in politics, which belongs to the relative, dominated by a spirit and a method specific to religion, which is linked to an absolute, dogmatic character that makes it definitive and unchangeable”.
For these reasons, Bernea distanced himself from the Legionary Movement and considered himself excluded from 1937. In March 1939, however, he was imprisoned with other “legionary” intellectuals in the Vaslui camp, from which he was released after signing a declaration dissociating himself from the Legionary Movement, shortly before the bloody anti-legionary reprisals of 21-22 September 1939, triggered by the assassination of Prime Minister Armand Călinescu. Unable to return to the university, Bernea became a technical advisor at the National Tourist Office in Bucharest, from where, after the fall of King Carol II’s regime, he was recruited by the Ministry of National Propaganda as Director of Studies and Documentation, then of the Press Department, and finally as Deputy Director of the Propaganda Department, where he continued to work after the defeat of the Legionary rebellion.
The lasso of prisons and work camps
In the summer of 1942, following a police investigation that suspected him of continuing his Legionary activities, Bernea was arrested and imprisoned in the Târgu Jiu camp, from where he was apparently released in February 1944 thanks to the intervention of Marshal Ion Antonescu, who held him in high esteem. Promoted to director of studies at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he worked there until the arrival of Ana Pauker at the head of the institution in September 1947, when he was dismissed.
Unemployed, Bernea had to move to the village of Poiana Mărului in Brașov County, where his wife had found a job as a teacher. In 1949, he was also hired as a teacher of physics and chemistry at the village school, but shortly afterwards (August 1949) he was dismissed and kept under investigation in Brașov until March 1950 for alleged “peasant” conspiracies he had hatched. He returned to the village office, but a slanderous denunciation by a journalist “friend” led to his being handcuffed again in July 1952, accused of being an “ideologist of the Legionary Movement” and sent to “re-education” in the labour colonies of the Danube-Black Sea Canal.
Because he refused to undergo communist “re-education”, it was considered necessary, after two years of administrative detention, to send him in the summer of 1954 to the commune of Schei, Galați region, without allowing him to see his family, who had moved to Zărnești. From this forced residence, he was arrested again on 30 March 1955.
The date of his arrest is no coincidence, since at the same time Father Ioan Iovan, Mother Mihaela Iordache and Mother Veronica were arrested at the Vladimirești monastery. The link between Vladimirești and the exiled scholar from Bărăgan was the young Roman Braga.
“Cultural Monastery”
The latter, recently released from the Canal, wanted to become a monk, inspired in part by the exhortations of Ernest Bernea. In a report of Father Braga’s interrogation on 12 April 1955, included in the investigation file on the Vladimirești prisoners, we learn that Ernest Bernea, who was imprisoned in the Peninsula labour colony in 1952, projected to his fellow prisoners a possible model of resistance to the disasters done by the Communist power. It was to be contained in a “spiritual abecedary” that would make people aware of the destructions they faced and how they could save themselves. The most sensitive point was the Romanian culture. It was being destroyed by an evil regime. Moreover, the evil spirit was taking the place of the true spirit of Romanian culture, falsifying it. This had been happening systematically since August 1944, and Bernea was determined to fight to make people aware of it.
Those who took it upon themselves to promote the true national spirit and the true Romanian culture were to be trained in a “cultural monastery”, a splendid image of Romanian utopianism, “the monastery of incense with brick walls”. Beyond the turmoil of politics, but at the service of society, the apostles were to spread the light of Christian faith and culture, which would dispel the darkness of the devil. This struggle, in the name of the Spirit, is the only one possible, according to Bernea, who, on the other hand, affirms the lack of correspondence between politics and Christianity, which implicitly means the rejection of violence, the true paths being those of apostolate and martyrdom.
Through informers, the Securitate had already learned of Ernest Bernea’s ideas in 1954, as well as the fact that Roman Braga believed that this idea was already being implemented in monasteries such as Slatina and Vladimirești. Since Securitate officers had long been trying to prove that there was undercover legionary activity in Vladimirești (a falsehood admitted in some documents even by the agents investigating the case), it was thought that Bernea’s views, as a former legionary ‘ideologist’, might be evidence that legionaries were entering monasteries to carry out their political activity in secret. Both Vladimirești and Bernea were arrested without any evidence, and it was hoped that the investigation would reveal this.
Man is more than a productive being
Finally, in the Vladimirești case, those arrested were convicted for the fact that a fugitive had passed through the monastery and killed two Militias sergeants, and as for Ernest Bernea, no causal link could be established between his statements and the monastic phenomenon in communist Romania. However, the investigators took note of the scholar’s prestige and the fact that the method of anti-communist resistance he proposed, although non-violent and purely spiritual, was much more dangerous than open combat with weapons in hand. For this reason, his old “legionary” writings were taken out of mothballs because he was accused of attacking the communist ideology. During the investigation, Bernea openly admitted that he disagreed with communism: “I wrote against communism with regard to the economic phenomenon and the human problem, i.e. with regard to the economy, I expressed the opinion that the economy is one of the manifestations of society and not its determining basis, as in Marxism. Similarly, the Marxist definition of man as a productive being seemed to me to be insufficient, a dimension which I recognised by integrating it with other dimensions, such as man as a rational being, man as a moral, social and political being”.
At the end of the investigation in Galați, Ernest Bernea was sentenced by the military court in Bucharest to 10 years’ imprisonment and partial confiscation of his property for “intensive activity against the working class” (Article 193 of the Communist Penal Code). Incidentally, when the state authorities went to Schei and Zărnești to confiscate Bernea’s assets, they found that he had no assets at all…
He spent most of his years in prison in Aiud. Those who knew Ernest Bernea say of his attitude there: “He waited in silence for the ten years to which he had been sentenced, at the end of which he would be released”. He was released on 1 October 1962, and in 1965, after an intensive review of his behaviour in freedom, the state authorities accepted, following numerous representations by Perpessicius and Al. Philipide, that Bernea be employed as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore of the Romanian Academy, from which he retired in 1972. However, his persecution continued until 1989, and in 1984 he was even arrested and severely beaten for refusing to give information to the Securitate. As for his work, despite efforts to make it ‘acceptable’, it was continually rejected by publishers under pressure from the authorities. It was not until well after 1990 that his work began to be (re)published, with the most substantial project being undertaken by the Vremea publishing house.
Ernest Bernea died on 14 November 1990 and was buried in the monastery of Cernica.
“He who climbs the mountain”
Perhaps the book by Bernea that is closest to my soul is “He Who Climbs the Mountain”. I experienced the arch of the climb with the traveller in the essay, felt his desperation and enjoyed the clear view at the end. I imagined him as a titan, gritting his teeth at every step. All the stranger to me was the picture of the author on the cover (pictured), captured in a state of tranquillity at his desk. Such a hard man seemed to be able to describe such struggles. On closer inspection I saw a trace of carefully controlled suffering, a deep and enveloping spiritual experience and a ‘first day look’. There at the desk, this man was climbing the mountain, again and again. I realised that there are other ways to get to the top. You don’t have to scream, cry out your pain and despair. If you live intensely but quietly inside, trusting that the next step will take you closer to limbo, if you assimilate the pain into a higher form of spirituality, gently but powerfully, quietly but firmly, you can climb any Golgotha, no matter how hard, and the joy of dawn will melt in the soul all the pains gathered under the seal of mystery.
The whole of Ernest Bernea’s life and projects are summed up in this photograph, in which the scholar appears to us as a monk of the cultural monastery, the “monastery of incense”, thinking of a book that would drive out the evil spirit that has invaded the Romanian culture and restore order, simplicity and faith in God to our consciousness.
(George Enache – Lumina Newspaper)