Monastic simplicity and the example of Father Athanasius
The Romanian monasteries are poor, deprived of today’s lack of generosity. But while they are in this state of impoverishment and exhaustion, our monasteries keep the right faith pure and unadulterated. Within the protection of their sacred walls, souls still flicker, thirsting for a light from above and longing for communion with the unique and eternal life proclaimed by our Saviour Jesus Christ. Secular culture has been forced to acknowledge the values of Eastern culture in the shadow of the monasteries, the ethical and intellectual value of the monastery as an institution. No more can be said of secularism, which values revelation rationally and does not justify it.
The monk alone is capable of preserving the treasure of the fruitful spirituality of Orthodoxy unaltered, and even of enriching it. That which is most moving and sublime in our Eastern religiosity, lived and not merely thought, can only endure through the monastery. The Church’s attempts at revival are salutary, but they have no guarantee of authenticity and depth if they are not supported by genuine monastic life. That is why we set out to discuss one of the essential qualities of monasticism, simplicity as a possibility for chosen humility and the depth of rigorous monastic discipline.
And how could we do this better than by appealing to a concrete example, the worthy monk Athanasius of the Petru Vodă monastery […].
The restoration of the image of the monk Atanasie, or Nea Sandu Ștefănescu, as we, his close friends, used to call him, can be part of a double approach: a historical one, to recover the figures of the anti-communist resistance, and a spiritual one, to restore monastic life. If we did not want to speak about the first aspect, which concerns the identity of memory as a revival of the past – although it would be worthwhile, especially since Alexandru Ștefănescu has a significant past of struggle against communism, which manifested itself in various forms – we will stop in this text at a lesser known dimension, that of the athlete of Christ.
Although he took the habit rather late, at the age of eighty, Alexandru Ștefănescu burned for this ideal of an authentic Christian life, which could only be improved by the revelation of the cenobitic coordinate. It was not by chance that he chose the monastery of Petru Vodă as a representative topos of Romanian monasticism, the providential work of Father Justin Pârvu, whose spiritual dimensions were to be seen later.
In this monastic community, created according to the patristic model, Sandu Ștefănescu found his fulfilment, responding to a mystical call. To what extent did the monk’s habit reconfigure Alexandru Stefanescu’s existential path?
Unlike certain isolated cases of monks, poor, unfortunate people, humiliated by the hectic of worldly life, insecure, without any kind of culture and inner life, terrorised by their immediate elders, kept themselves in the shadows of their hermitages not out of religious zeal but out of an organic inability to have a purpose in life, Gathered there as if in an asylum for the infirm, Alexandru Ștefănescu did nothing but follow the indelible line of his destiny and pursue his monastic vocation, which he had always nurtured at the height of his past sacrifice for Christ. He put on the habit of his youth and embarked on the martyrdom of the Christian faith. An introspective, questioning, reflective nature penetrated to the essence of things and revealed their great meanings. His simplicity concealed a real inclination to reach the depths, the mysterious meanings that modern human nature deludes itself into believing it can discover rationally.
Always dedicated, always conscious of a job well done, he did not waste himself in secondary, insignificant activities, but always aimed at the essential. In a cordial discussion or a polemic, he knew how to distinguish right from wrong, always guided by the stake of truth and its triumph over falsehood. A man of action, but also of prayer, Alexandru Ștefănescu could not stand inactivity, everyday idleness, which he considered harmful to any ontological revival. He knew how to make himself useful to his fellow men, to contribute to their unstinting help, generosity, altruism, self-giving being the valences of his inner structure.
His specifically monastic simplicity was a constant exercise in humility, in sobriety, in modesty. This simplicity consists in the mastery of a soul that is free from all kinds of thoughts and that cannot be moved to cunning. The gentle soul is truly the home of simplicity, in the patristic line of St. John the Fearful, the righteous soul is the companion of humility.
Alexandru Ștefănescu lived his faith naturally, without false piety. Alexandru Ștefănescu is part of the tradition of Romanian saints in communist prisons who, through their example of self-giving and sacrifice, have marked our recent history, becoming solid landmarks of our identity. […]
(Constantin Mihai – Rost Magazine, year VII, no. 79, 2009, pp. 27-28)