“Father Dumitru Stăniloae is the most precious gift that the land of Transylvania has given to our national landscape”.
From now on he is really with us. He [Dumitru Stăniloae] belongs to the line of those who do not go away: having entered eternity, he returns with it in the chalice; a working priesthood beyond the ages.
There was a time when we worked together, in the same room in the Antim monastery, on a floor lined with ink. We had just come from Aiud, we were waiting for our hair to grow and we were writing for magazines, at least we didn’t have the “right to sign” yet: he, Stăniloae, had to get a pseudonym, a pseudonym under which he could earn a few pennies for himself and his family.
Then I saw him working and I didn’t know whether to envy or admire him. His younger colleague, who had learnt to turn the word twenty times at the tip of his pen, was fascinated by the speed with which the professor was able to produce dozens of pages, as if in a single breath, line by line, row by row, with his almost impossible, ugly, sloppy, messy, elliptical writing, in complete contrast to the crystal order of a cosmic intellect, barely perceptible between two sheets of paper. Seldom an amend to the text, just as seldom a hasty check of a patristic quotation.
The man didn’t look as if he had spent five years in prison; everything in him had been kept round and clean, in a treasure that could no longer be memory: it was life. Well, when you come to live God to the full, you don’t need to remember Him, because He remembers you. Then, as I watched Fr. Stăniloae write, I knew that there was a fever of the Holy Spirit: a fever of those chosen by the Lord to put into words what He had written in the sand. Beyond the academic years, beyond the work, beyond the asceticism and devotion, Father Stăniloae’s enormous work is a grace; no, not a state of grace, but an outpouring of grace.
It would be wrong to think that the professor lived in a theological ivory tower. He carried within him all the antennae of the temperamental gazetteer, ready to grasp not only the fact but also its immediate sign, ready to give an answer in a polemical spirit that was not lacking in nobility and chivalry. A founding member of the Reflection Group after December ’89, he took a daily interest in the Church’s affairs, which were then drifting, and behaved like the mate of a ship tossed by the waves; leaning on the mast and watching the storm, he roared with the controlled fury of the perennial sage. And he remained optimistic. He had only one sadness: where are the intellectuals of the past, who all jumped to defend the Church in times of trouble?
And only one passion: love for the Church of his nation. The Church and the nation, two entities that can neither be divided nor separated. Let us not forget that Father Stăniloae is the author of the declaration: We Romanians are unique: we are the only people of Latin origin and Orthodox faith; through our Latinity we belong to the West, through our Orthodoxy we belong to the East; we are the ideal bridge between the two worlds. This statement, now commonplace, could become the basis of our entire national policy in the context of the European reorientation.
Father Dumitru Stăniloae, born in Vlădeni of Făgăraș, is the most precious gift that the land of Transylvania has given to our national landscape.
(Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania, The Living Water of Orthodoxy, Renaissance Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2002, pp. 33-34)