Mircea Vulcănescu, “one of the encyclopaedic geniuses of Romanian culture and a practitioner of the Christian life”

I had Mircea Vulcănescu as a professor of ethics at the University of Bucharest during my undergraduate studies. His Saturday afternoon lectures were full of dynamism and originality. He came to the lectures with handouts, organised by problems and structured by essentials, but the presentation and the course were made full and charming by the personal note of the speaker, who fascinated by his eloquence, originality and the broad perspective in which he framed any problem, idea or philosophical system.

In this way, his handouts became mere tools, because during the lecture, Vulcănescu was a true creator. It was as if you could see his ideas piling up in his head and he could no longer contain himself from their whirlwind.

The professor had an impressive ability to capture the essence of ideas, to bring out the essential and to trace the most subtle implications in various fields of activity and thought. His definitions were clear and decisive in the process of understanding a philosophical school, an ethical position or the idea he was discussing.

Vulcănescu pursued with logical and pedagogical rigour the meaning of concepts on all subsidiary levels, from political economy to metaphysics and theology. His concerns were multilateral, encyclopaedic in nature, all framed within a hierarchy of values in which both the contradictions and the harmonies of his vision could be perceived, which he tried to make understandable and contained within a purely Romanian philosophy. His immediate interest was in the Romanian phenomenon. He spoke and wrote about Freud, but tried to approach, decipher and understand the specific Romanian values in the life and work of Ion Creangă.

He was a director of customs in the Ministry of Finance, but he wrote about the concept of spirituality, carried out in different ideological structures. He participated in the meetings of the Council of Ministers, but at the same time he passionately followed the war in Soviet Russia and wrote about the philosophy of the Romanian people and the position of the Christian in the modern world.

Mircea Vulcănescu is one of the encyclopaedic geniuses of Romanian culture; a prodigious genius and practitioner of the Christian life. After the capitulation of 1945, he was arrested, along with all the members of the government of the time, and condemned for having supported the war imposed by those who had annexed us from the body of the country. In communist terminology, he was also guilty of ‘the disaster of Romania’.

In prison, more than anywhere else, he had the opportunity to put into practice the Christian morality he had taught in his teaching and in his writings, because of the special living conditions created by the communist government with the intention of liquidating all political prisoners.

There were two circumstances in his life as a prisoner about which I can testify to the exact situation in which he found himself: one, during his imprisonment in Jilava, and the other, in relation to his dramatic death in Aiud prison.

In the spring of 1951, I found myself in the cellars of Jilava, with three years of investigation and the misery of prison behind me, and no prospect of resolving my legal situation. The investigation could in no way have led to my trial, since no guilt could be established, no statement could be made and no material evidence could be found against me. So, without being convicted, I was assigned to one of the large cells in the ward, where life became a misery and a nightmare. Food was scarce, medical and sanitary care was non-existent and the beatings continued unabated. In the mornings and evenings, at the count, we were cruelly beaten by the guards who waited for us at the entrance and exit with clubs in their hands, beating us mercilessly and without any regard for the physical condition of the prisoners. The only relief came from the arrival of new prisoners, who were actually a sort of rotation from other cells. They would bring us news, about other prisoners or even from outside, about the political situation, both internal and external.

The cell I was in at the time had direct contact, through the corridor between the doors, with three other cells, so the sources of information increased in number. In this way, many political, spiritual and military personalities, of whom the Romanian nation was once proud, were brought to our section. Alexandru Constant, also came from a cell of recovery, after having spent some time with Mircea Vulcănescu, with whom he experienced the ordeal and bitterness of savage beatings and isolation for three days and three nights in cell 16, called the Black Cell. During the time they lived together, in another wing of Jilavei, Vulcănescu and others used to give lectures on various subjects to strengthen and instruct themselves and their listeners. After one of Mircea Vulcănescu’s lectures, a guard appeared and took him and his group outside to the inner courtyard of the Jilava fort, where they were beaten with truncheons and rubber truncheons until they fainted. Then they stripped them naked and threw them in a heap into the darkness of the Black Cell, for without any light, the darkness in the Black Cell was absolute. You seem to forget that they lay there for three days and three nights, among urine and faeces. An eternity of darkness! Hungry, cold, damp. They had no chairs, no table, no bed. They all walked through the dirt, from corner to corner, to keep warm and prevent their bodies from collapsing. Mircea Vulcănescu was the one who gave them the most encouragement and kept their spirits up. Until he himself realised the tragedy of their situation.

– Under these circumstances, Vulcănescu said in the simplest and kindest way, begging them to accept his proposal, “there is no escape for us, unless something happens that forces the administration to take a rescue measure, if a rescue still exists. I can’t physically resist any longer. I feel exhausted from all this ordeal. I will lie down, on my stomach, in the last moments of my life, and in this way you will have a place to rest, on my body. I ask God to take my soul and help you to survive…

There was an atmosphere of serenity and peace with death and acceptance of a Christian destiny. Vulcănescu’s partners were shaken by this proposal and the weakening of his resistance. They flatly refused and took steps to revive him and get him back into the race, to restore his physical strength. They reminded him of the sin of suicide and the virtue of hope. This occasion gave Mircea Vulcănescu the opportunity to develop some thoughts on life and death and the destiny of man, which made him turn away from the worries to which he had, for a moment, given himself up. His friends did not approve of his suicide, and Vulcănescu considered this rare flower of friendship to be the most beautiful ornament of Christian life.

Time passed, painfully, and when their isolation ended, even the guards were astonished at the miracle that had occurred, finding them still alive when the death cell was opened. Exhausted, he and his friends were taken away and thrown into a new cell, filled with the remnants of the generation of victims, with young men who were tired and resistant to the communist re-education process. They all lived in a contemporary atmosphere of anxiety and fear. However, in the face of the apocalyptic spectacle they saw, with beings disfigured by suffering, cold, hunger and filth, these young people had the courage of all young people, and they alone faced their educator, jumping to the support of the oppressed, accepting all the risks.

From Jilava, Vulcănescu was taken to Aiud, where I arrived in the summer of 1951.

I didn’t know about his adventures until 1952, when I started working in the prison factory, in the metallurgy section. In the factory I was in the same group as a prisoner who shared a cell with Vulcănescu. Since Vulcănescu did not work anywhere, I managed to keep in touch with my teacher for about two months. I sent him political and food news, which he desperately needed, but I also told him about the problems and questions that constantly preoccupied me, to which he replied with his views and explanations; most of them concerned Romanian culture and its future prospects.

I can, now and here, give some of the most important points of view that preoccupied Vulcănescu at that time. I asked him what he thought was the most characteristic aspect of prison life at that time. Our mutual friend gave me his answers constantly and faithfully. I remembered almost everything that was essential because it came from Mircea Vulcănescu, and the depth of his insights helped me to clear the waters of my own soul.

Three were, according to M. Vulcănescu, the most characteristic aspects of life in communist prisons:

I. The state of national suffering. Not only the political prisoners live in misery and drama, but also all their families, all the political parties that did not understand or understood too late the generation of supreme sacrifices, all the social classes, all their friends and… all their opponents. The whole country is overwhelmed by suffering. This is the concept that embraces and characterises the moment of historical collapse that lasted from 1951-1952, since the illegitimate establishment of the Soviet-Marxist regime. Through this collective national suffering, he saw a strong revival of Christian religious revival, a return to authentic forms of faith in God and fervent prayers for salvation. He saw no other path to salvation. Communism, neither in its form nor in its content, can offer the salvation of man and the national being. Its application to the Romanian reality will certainly lead to a natural reaction characteristic of the Romanian background: the Christian reaction. 

II. The impressive numerical presence everywhere of the generation that founded the school of modern Romanian nationalism, unique and independent, charged with the moral health of an attitude of confidence and optimism.

But Mircea Vulcănescu also said that he had never sufficiently understood the phenomenon of this generation as part of a Romanian spiritual order. He saw this phenomenon as a resurgence of negative forces that tended to disrupt the order of Romanian specificity and even to break the mioritic harmonies of the Romanian worldview. Vulcănescu sought to analyse and understand this ideology, which seemed to him to be far removed from national realities and to be upsetting the very foundations and structures of the country. What is this generation of “suicides”, of benefactors of death, of harbingers of the future, what is this generation marked by gigantic personalities that wanted to be erased and covered with concrete, what is the meaning of the Christian sacrifice of those who fell in Spain for the Romanian nation and the world? Always anxiously asking himself this question, Vulcănescu came to understand and believe in the creative power of elites in all fields of human manifestation.

Before his imprisonment in Jilava, had he not read a diary from Jilava prison? and had it not given him, Vulcănescu, a new understanding of the mythical man at the head of the generation of young men who had become the icon of Romania? The elites, in their close relationship with the Romanian peasantry and workers, were factors for which, according to Mircea Vulcănescu, it was difficult to find a logical, ordinary explanation.

Every sacrifice for Christ is a real, rich spiritual value with incalculable consequences for the future. In prison, Vulcănescu met and lived with this Romanian world in the flesh. Within the walls of the cells he saw children united to the cross. In them he saw the reservoir of Romanian resistance, the strength of concepts that bore fruit in the most difficult conditions. Their unity, their courage, their sacrifice and their help for the powerless seemed to Vulcănescu an inexhaustible source of miracles. In the cell of a condemned man, Vulcănescu saw the balladic incarnation, serene and peaceful, awaiting his execution. He hoped that those who would be released from the clutches and sufferings of prisons would be bearers of a true spiritual treasure for the kind of new man forged in the furnaces of torment. If they all perish in prison, their legend will have the power of the ages…

III. Vulcănescu considered the fermentation process of a new Romanian world to be the third characteristic aspect of the political prisons. The entire collective of political prisoners went through the agony of experience, through the harshest trials, through the confrontation of their own ideals, attitudes, understandings and political working methods. In the heat of these trials, everyone has revised their positions and the basis for future political action. Not once has Romania gone through periods of invasion and destruction, but the Romanian nation, through itself and through its suffering, has found new ways out of the impasse. God defends the history of the nations that are with Him. The political prisoners in Romania, and with them the country – a huge prison – have hidden in God the awareness of their mission.

Then our communication was interrupted. Our friend had been transferred to another cell. But I met Mircea Vulcănescu a short time later in the prison hospital of Aiud. I was there for an operation for acute appendicitis, he was there with pneumonia; he was on the verge of death. We didn’t live together, but we saw him whenever we went out into the corridor. We would wave to each other without saying a word. His condition was heartbreaking. A well-built man, he was now a wreck, his eyes deep in their sockets, but unblinking, as if the mysteries of the world and of life were burning in them, which had spent a lifetime trying to understand their face and their meaning. Only once did I manage to shake his hand. He looked at me in silence, enveloping me with his penetrating gaze, then both his hands clasped mine in a final greeting. I shuddered at the invisible magnets he was using to convey my final message of friendship. Soon, a few days later, I learned that Mircea Vulcanescu, the great thinker, the great man, the great oracle, had gone to the other world. Mircea Vulcanescu, a genius, the meaning of suffering in Romanian philosophy. I still see and I still cry…

(Ioan Halmaghi, Pittsburgh, 1975, Contemporary Discourse, Tom 1, 1977)