Metropolitan Bartholomew or the price of freedom

Fact: Archbishop Bartholomew is not a role model. Why not?! In a world where half-measures pass for measures, where mercenarism (including ecclesiastical mercenarism) passes for cleverness, or hides behind hypocritical humility or selfish modesty, where any formula is good if it doesn’t bother anyone and suits as many people as possible, in which the idea of a career implies the total renunciation of freedom of thought and courage of opinion, in which competence is the ultimate criterion for public office, just as any critical attitude is promptly rejected – well, in such an age, the years Bartholomew Valerius Ananias spent in our history represent a biography marked by obvious discomfort.

At all levels. In other words, in a Romania polluted by stars and superstars, by idols and VIPs, by telegenic idiots and perverted ideologues, by false opinion leaders and egomaniacs, by politicians hungry for image but not for content, by ecclesiastical leaders pathologically cultivating the cult of personality, the only way to be oneself, to be faithful to one’s principles, i.e. to be free, is not to be liked, not to be homologated, not to confirm any scheme. In other words, to be an anti-model. Quite simply.

In the cultural-intellectual space, as is well known, it is just as easy to be accepted as it is for the same majority to reject you. All the more so if your approach is different. Thus, it was/is by no means easy or risk-free to try to programmatically restore the engagement between letters and logos. Especially in an atheistic ideological regime like the communist one of a decade and a half ago. Accusations of mysticism could quickly be followed by accusations of a lack of realism or subversive tendencies in the text. His dual role as a man of the Church and a man of letters may have seemed a challenge to many. Just as today, in an environment that is no less arrogant and anticlerical, being a theologian with a high profile and at the same time being a great intellectual seem to be radically different positions that cannot be reconciled in the same person. Therefore, to want to assert oneself as a literary figure while preserving one’s religious mark, without following fashions or trends, without making stylistic and thematic compromises, without allowing oneself to be taken in by one group and attacking another, without playing into anyone’s hands and without wagging one’s elbows – well, all this really points to an anti-celebrity model.

What in the world of literature and culture in general can be attributed to vanity and competition between ideological clans is, in the ecclesial environment, the fruit of a different kind of perception. Here, the coincidence between theology and culture could be homologated with a weak or insufficient faith, without spiritual depth. A cultured monk is potentially proud, just as a well-educated priest is potentially rebellious. The intellectual and moral complexes of some, usually found in the upper echelons of Church administration, can cost you credibility and peace of mind. Especially in a system that, compared to the rest of post-communist Romanian society, has slowed down the renewal by apologetic adaptation of the Church to the signs of the times as much as possible. To have, in such a human landscape, the almost unique dignity of a prophetic approach to essential and urgent issues, to call for things to be put back on the evangelical track, to expose intellectual deception and spiritual corruption, not to indulge in a promiscuous and guilty relationship with political power, tainted with dirty money and blood, not to cultivate ambiguities that pass for evidence of diplomacy, To want to serve Christ fully and faithfully, coming to meet the disinherited of fate, but also the excellences of the city, to help them on the path of affirmation, to stand up for the freedom of the Church and for dialogue, without renouncing one’s own identity, to want to preserve one’s dignity, even at the risk of being exposed to juicy slander and insidious gossip – well, even these together can only constitute the traits of an anti-model.

The price of resisting the temptation to participate more in the fall than in the effort to recover can be nothing other than to end up smeared with mud. In the end, it is a self-preserving gesture of corrupt human nature. The light that is too bright, too disturbing, too relentless, the light that shows us the sordid reality in which we indulge, is instinctively covered with blankets and newspapers, placed under a shutter. Neither the political sphere, nor the cultural sphere, nor the ecclesiastical sphere, in which an invisible spiritual war is constantly being waged, can completely escape the meteors of fallen creation. All the more so because, in most cases, this is not even desired. Therefore, in whatever world and system you find yourself, the desire to be yourself is sanctioned as the ultimate guilt. The guilt of stubbornly refusing to be like others cannot go unpunished. And since the apotheosis of mediocrity is characterised by a solidarity worthy of higher ideals, it is not surprising that one often feels unjustly abandoned in the middle of an absurd game.

This feeling of loneliness in the midst of communion must have often permeated the intimate fibre of Bartholomew Valerius Ananias. Like a pear stuck in the middle of a storm – Petre Țuțea’s favourite expression, another destiny in upheaval – neither the pupil, nor the monk, nor the young man of letters, nor the deacon, nor the political prisoner, nor the inspector, nor the missionary priest, nor the director, nor the retired archimandrite, nor the archbishop called to service, nor the metropolitan, have spared enthusiasm or disappointment, strength or weakness, idealism or stumbling, ambitious initiatives or failures, dreams or nightmares. The common denominator in all these hypostases was loneliness. There is no heavier burden for a fighter than to find himself alone in the midst of formal synodality, to fight like a general with an army of privates, to receive foolish suggestions from subordinates and to see his loved ones take a step backwards in the face of a system confirmed by the very man who should have stood above it.

Lack of faith, clarity and loneliness can easily turn into misanthropy and disenchantment. But the biography of the man who would have completed nine decades of living testimony shows us something quite different. In fact, what we have here is a personal, very intimate form of imitatio Christi. The Saviour Jesus Christ himself was an anti-model, a “loser”: adored at first by a crowd incapable of understanding Him as long as they saw Him as a political liberator, respected because He worked miracles, able to enter into profound dialogue with only a few who were socially, religiously and ethnically totally unsuitable, accused by all, abandoned by His counsellors and crucified. All the signs pointed clearly to a “career” that had been fundamentally thwarted. What followed, as we all know, was something completely different and unexpected. The miracle of the Incarnation, death and Resurrection is fundamentally at odds with the rules of fallen creation by which we so often orient our own lives and judge the lives of others. On the biographical level of our Father, we see how the one who was thrown out of Cluj with the gendarmes returned with honours, how the one who was kept in a cell consecrated the prison chapel in the robes of a Byzantine emperor, how the one who was kept away from important ecclesiastical obedience with common tricks and denunciations became the undisputed leader of the majority of the episcopate for almost two decades. Therefore, I do not think there is a more natural way to pay homage to a successor of the Apostles than to note that, like them, he experienced hatred in his desire to preach love, and that he succeeded in convincing the nations (i.e. the outside world) rather than his own people (i.e. the system). In other words, a life crowned with a very different kind of atypical success. Perhaps the only one that really counts.

(Radu Preda – Tabor Magazine No. 1, Year V, April 2011)