Father Arsenios Boca – manhood and holiness
A confessor and clairvoyant who became a legend, a great living man, but also a great scholar, theologian and icon painter, “Father Arsenios Boca was a unique phenomenon in the history of Romanian monasticism” (D. Stăniloae). Father Arsenios, who died shortly before the collapse of the old communist regime (which he is said to have prophesied), rests in the monastery of Prislop, the monastery where he was first exiled by the communists and which eventually became his home. His footprints remain indelible in the Romanian Orthodox spirituality, sanctifying all the places he visited, from Făgăraș to Hațeg and from Sinaia to Bucharest. “Of all the people I have known who have worked in the Church – confesses Father Teofil Părăian, his spiritual disciple – I believe that Father Arsenios Boca was the most outstanding, the pinnacle of life and preacher of our contemporaneity”.
On the 10th of May 1929, in the courtyard of the “Avram Iancu” Gymnasium in Brad, the head of the graduating class of that year, the young Zian Boca, in a festive atmosphere, planted a gorun which, according to the decision of all present, was to be called “Zian’s gorun”. He, who was born in the heart of Transylvania, in Vața de Jos, near Țebea, where the “Gorunul lui Horea” (Horea’s Gorun) stands guard, made a symbolic gesture that we can only sing today in all its meaning: not far from the Gorun of the great martyr in the history of our nation, the Gorun of the one who, under the monastic name of Arsenios (in Gr. The great charismatic confessor of the ancestral faith, in the midst and in the middle of a “mad century”.
After studying theology and fine arts, but also taking passionate courses in medicine, Zian Boca was ordained a celibate deacon in 1935, and in 1939 he set off for Mount Athos, where he spent three months preparing for monastic life. It is said that there he met a stern confessor who said to him: “Man, you are not fit for anything! You’re not even good at sweeping!” The young man said to himself: “This is where I belong, I’m staying here! From his earliest youth, one could sense in him the vocation of the man who would later proclaim: “Not everyone in the world is ruined, not everyone in the monastery is saved… Some of the monks are not monks, but hangers of monastic robes… If you want to be a monk, become like fire!
In the summer of the same year he was ordained in the monastery of Sâmbăta de Sus, and the following year he became a monk and began what was called “the movement of spiritual revival in Sâmbăta”, that “great spiritual whirlpool” of which one Nichifor Crainic exclaimed: “What an uplifting time, when the whole land of Avram Iancu moved in pilgrimage, singing with snow up to their chests, towards Sâmbăta de Sus, the foundation of the martyred voivode [Constantin Brâncoveanu]! At the same time, bringing the necessary manuscripts from Mount Athos and collaborating with Father Dumitru Stăniloae, he will be a true founder of the Romanian Philokalia, for which he will also design the cover. Against the background of this spiritual effervescence, he wrote to a former schoolmate: “I have taken up the chariot of a rather difficult ideal: the transformation of man into Man, the younger son of God and brother of his Elder Son. But all great ideals have something paralysing about them: they don’t let you worry about the nothingness of this life”.
The times were fast and the crippling communism was digging its claws deeper and deeper into the body of the country. Because of his Christian support of the anti-communist fighters in the Făgăraș mountains, Father came under the scrutiny of the Securitate and was arrested for the first time in 1948. Forcibly transferred from Sâmbăta to Prislop, he became abbot there, and after the village was transformed into a nunnery, he remained as confessor until 1959, when the communists dispersed the congregation. In the meantime he had been arrested again and taken to the Canal, where he stayed for almost a year. He then moved to Bucharest, where he was kept on the sidelines as a simple church painter, always under the watchful eye of the atheist authorities. In the last part of his life, he would be very much tied to two places: Drăgănescu (where he painted the church for 15 years, starting in 1968, leaving us a true “sermon in pictures”, even if it is quite questionable in relation to the canons of traditional iconography) and Sinaia (where he had his chapel and painting studio from 1969, where he retired more and more, and where he closed his eyes on the eve of the winter of 1989, at the age of 79).
The most important remaining writings of Father Arsenios (which for a long time circulated “under the table”, in typescripts, sometimes without his signature) were published after 1990, from The Fall of the Kingdom to the recent volume Father Arsenios Boca – Great Guide of Souls in the 20th Century. A synthesis of Father Arsenios’s thought in 800 heads, by Ioan Gânscă, with the assistance of Father Archimandrite Teofil Părăian (from whom we have taken some of the material for this brief memorial). His word takes us to other times and reveals to us the Gate of Light of the Kingdom, always reminding us that “nations have a hidden destiny in God. If they follow their destiny, they will have God’s protection. If they betray it, they will be punished”.
(Răzvan Codrescu – Rost Magazine, no. 20, October 2004)