Patriarch of Orthodox dogmatic theology

God, the Scriptures say, has appointed for every nation an angel of its own – a guardian, a kind of governor of the kingdom, set up in the dwelling places of the earth.

He also seems to have appointed a ruler for every age, most often among men. For our time, at least in this country, Father Stăniloae has been appointed, because he has found himself best suited for this office. With his imposing stature, unshakable health, inexhaustible energy for work, tenacious to the point of stubbornness, consistent to the point of sacrifice, he carried his age on his shoulders like an Atlas, this time real and not mythological. Without being sad, few ever caught him laughing; as wild in nature as any person from Ardeal, he turned his inner storm into a work of enormous proportions, full of gentleness, wisdom, balance, depth, vastness, density and many other prescient qualities. It was given to Romanian Orthodoxy that, in this terrible century, the absolute theological discourse should be presented in our language.

For more than fifty years, national, international and world congresses have been dominated by Father Dimitrie Stăniloae, to the extent that Romanian theology is spontaneously identified with his name, which theologians and scholars from all over the world recite with veneration.

It has often happened to me to witness unforgivable confusions in which we Romanians had our capital either at Belgrade or at Budapest. But when I came to the theological chapter, his unmistakable name definitively fixed the origin and the nation.

With patience and tenacity, he imposed himself on believers and unbelievers, on the learned and the uneducated. It will be a crucial point of exegesis that it was precisely the most inhuman and abominable age that gave Romanian theology its most outstanding and imposing fruit. Of course, one of the answers would be that the most majestic trees grow only in a storm.

A careful eye will discover behind this great work all the self-destruction, all the sacrifice and renunciation, the passage, through the thinning of the self, from blood to spirit, from will to power. For, as St. James warns us (5:17), we must not forget the man Stăniloae for the sake of the theologian. His struggle, as Saint Paul warns us, was not only against blood and flesh, but also against many other invisible obstacles, which he had to overcome victoriously, on the way that leads “from glory to glory to the revelation of the sons of God” (II Cor 3:18).

No man of his stature was poorer; he should have lived in a palace without “worldly cares”, in a comfortable room in which to set up an office worthy of the man who worked in it, and above all with endless walls against which to lean the densest library in the land. But who does not know that he lived, this giant “whom time cannot contain”, in a tiny space (about 20 square meters of living space) where he had to improvise two rooms and pile up thousands of volumes? (…) I don’t want to reproach him for being so insignificant on this earth, but the innumerable disciples, not a few of whom became hierarchs and prefects, or abbots, councilors and abbesses, and who loved and cherished him as they should, could all together have built him a nest better suited to the span of his Ionian eagle’s wings.

He was of immeasurable endurance, and nothing could tempt him to make his material life easier. Who could have refused him an extraordinary parish, which he would have administered with great merit and with all the advantages that would naturally follow?

And the money he received from his professorship he invested in books and the materials necessary for his writing. As for the other money he received for his writings, with which he literally filled the age, anyone who has done real culture knows well that the gain from a good book never outweighs the expense. More often than not, the interest goes to his descendants; he was always left with the toil, the want, the care and the spiritual joy of having succeeded in giving the nation a body of doctrine without equal. Once I even dared to tell him what was often said about the supposedly fabulous income from his writings. A mixture of anger and sadness clouded his face for a moment, and he replied that only the writer knew the true drama of this profession. At the time I didn’t quite believe him, but now I know exactly what he meant.

A chronograph specially implanted in the heart of time would tell us that every seven centuries a great synthesiser appears. In the first century, St John the Theologian; in the seventh century, St John Damascene; in the fourteenth century, St Gregory Palamas; and in the twentieth century, so far I see no other candidate for the post than Father Stăniloae. Following the advice of the Apostle, he has “searched everything” and has retained what is good, not only from the whole of Christian theology. The fact that he is at ease in German, Greek and French has enabled him to capture the spiritual quintessence of world culture and thought in the Romanian language, which he masters like a poet. And it must be emphasised that, although the adventure of his knowledge knows no bounds, the specificity of his expression, with all its acridity, remains orthodox. There is a happy coexistence between the universal and the Orthodox, which lend each other richness and depth. If in this age we were to receive a visit from Sts. Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Maxim the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, etc., they could only be received by the Father, in a more than comfortable spiritual space.

Personally, I am happy to have known him intimately, and it seems that I will figure in his legendary story as the only man with whom he agreed to sign a book, as the common fruit of theological endeavour, of course a volume of translations from the writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa, in which my part is tiny, but it remains an astonishing fact and a source of boundless pride for me.

There were many evenings when, under the protection of a wall full of books (you didn’t know whether it supported the books or vice versa), the soft, fervent word gently twisted the deep meaning of the seen and the unseen. I think he had no greater pleasure than to be sought out by disciples with essential questions, for which he would rummage a little in the depths of his being and thought, and then, like a pearl-finder in the abyss, bring back the shining pearl of an inspired and definitive answer.

I shuddered once when he told me – he was over eighty years old – that he felt he had not said the essential, that he was only now beginning to write the true and complete work. I understood then, “with fear and trembling”, that the truly great man will always feel small in relation to the greatness of the Being whose infinite edges he has for a moment grasped. I understood exactly what Socrates meant by this play on words: “I know that I know nothing”; more precisely, I understood that true humility is only the gift of true greatness, and vice versa.

In Orthodox patristics there are two categories of sources: there is the category of fathers to be consulted comparatively and as many as possible, and the category of those who are unique and decisive; in our time, whoever wanted to cut all roads short went straight to Fr. Stăniloae. There the answer is complete and full: and this because he himself, first and foremost, and more than many others, crossed far and wide, and the sea, and heaven and earth. And he stayed at home with us, in our little homeland, which he did not change, although he could have, despite all the invitations and entreaties of the world. We could have been saddened by the estrangement of other great Romanians in this century: Eliade, Cioran, Ionescu; but we are left with Stăniloae, “the good part that will not be taken away from us” in this century.

The Professor

At the end of this century, and even a decade or two into the next, all those who had the good fortune to learn a book in the “terrible century” will turn their eyes to the centre of Romanian pedagogy – Professor Stăniloae. Of course, he was also a priest and a writer and a scholar and a man and a father, a good husband, etc.; his biography is complete and round, but in the middle of this circle, like the ancient Archimedes, stands, huge, the statue (or statue) of the professor. Born on the border between East and West, he grasped both extremes with the strong arms of the Transylvanian ploughman and forced them together into a clear mind bathed in the dew of the Mioritic plain. On the shelves of his library, one could observe with amazement a marriage that elsewhere would have been impossible, between Karl Barth and St. John Chrysostom, both understood in their own language and essence. But the greater chance was that he was a giant among giants (or vice versa). If you look at him from a distance of several decades, among confreres like Teodor M. Popescu, Ioan Coman, Liviu Stan, Isidor Todoran, Alexandru Elian, Petru Rezuș, Ene Braniște, etc., and see him with his head above the massif, it is too easy to understand that he was the summit, i.e. Everest. So the great ones around him pushed him higher and higher until he touched the ceiling of heaven with his forehead and spoke to us things that would have been difficult for anyone else to understand (cf. II Cor 12:4). (…)

One had the impression that he was speaking to himself and not to those of us who did not really exist in the midst of his immense presence. The strange thing was that while he was talking about heaven, he was looking down at the earth, because we have to admit that even if he had a sin (perhaps some devilish advocate could have planted something in his place), no one could accuse him of pride. Besides, he worked so hard that he had no time for sin; he ploughed far and wide the field of theology, the face of heaven.

An austere man, he did not allow himself to be comforted in his hard existence, hung on the pegs of uninterrupted contemplation. Only the femininity (of Moldavian origin) contained in his name – also predestined – softened a little the harsh universe of theological thought, bringing the minimum percentage of tenderness absolutely necessary for Christian, Orthodox mysticism.

In the easternmost room of the Faculty of Theology (…) the professor, absorbed in himself, spent two hours in a monologue on the mysteries hidden in the ocean of divine-human existence. His obsessive subject was the Holy Trinity, and wherever he began, he ended there, determined to free theology from the solipsism of henotheistic monotheism, an extreme metaphysical conception blindly defended by Judaism and Islam. These were his own words, spoken softly, as if to himself, while gnawing his moustache in the right corner of his mouth: “A lonely God, isolated in metaphysics, would not feel right. A God who does not give birth is a barren and fearful God; there would be no love”.

For it must be emphasised that the theologian Stăniloae was an exemplary family man, and his God could only bear a spirit of love and family communion. In other words, Father Dimitne, in his mystical theology, humanised a God who, in other religious spaces of the world, was in danger of remaining metaphysical and therefore incommunicable. He managed to make Him ours as we were His. All this concretely and personally in the Son, in whom both the Father and the Spirit rest fully (Phil 2:7).

But do not think that the Professor was not an ordinary man. I had the happy opportunity to catch him in moments of relaxation. After the uncompromising academicism of the professor’s office, he went from the upper floor to the basement, where the second part of the event took place. The presence of the professorial luminaries turned this meal into a Platonic banquet, and along with the traditional food and drink, one could taste to the full other ingredients: irony, sarcasm, humour, circumstantial oratory, all of the finest quality. Cunning arrows flew from one side or the other, and not a few were aimed at Stăniloae, but to our dismay he was not in his debt in this respect either. Old debts, accumulated over time, were paid off promptly and in full. And if in the end we rose with our bellies too full of bodily nourishment, our souls remained insatiable for the beauty of the spiritual feast, which will probably never be repeated in this time and space. The great of old were great by profession. And Fr. Stăniloae surpassed them all by a head.

The professor has crept deep into us, like an eternal restlessness. We live from Stăniloae, we think from Stăniloae, we hope from Stăniloae, we sigh from Stăniloae, or we smile from Stăniloae. The transfer for which he worked so tenaciously all his life has taken place: His orthodoxy has become endemic and, above all, pandemic.

The death of the Holy Father

On an autumn morning in Plumburi, the voice of the radio announcer told the country that our Father Dumitru Stăniloae had gone to eternity. His end was like the end of the world: long awaited, but desired by no one. Without him, we remained a head shorter. We remained a small world, a small country, an ordinary people; we had no summit.

I am sure that time and the Romanian space will wake up and bring another Fr. Stăniloae to our skies; different, of course, but the same. We cannot live without him. For now we are orphans, the national spirituality is empty.

I could see him growing towards the Kingdom, even physically. He was growing taller, thinner every day, his face taking on something of the light, the glow of the white cloud that Scripture tells us carried Moses and Elijah to their meeting on Mount Tabor. In fact, it was there that Father went, as late as the 1930s, when he met the transfigured and unique Jesus the Restorer.

Father had been living on the road for some years; he was already consuming the part of eternity in which he was immersed with his spirit and where he spent much more time than on the other side of existence. He had practised the great departure for so long, had researched the Way so thoroughly, that nothing was foreign to him now. He seemed a little worried about us, in whose care he was leaving us. But he also encouraged himself by repeating the words of Abraham on the Mount of Salvation: “God will take care of his offering” (Acts 22:8).

I am sure that if he could have taken anything with him from this world, it would have been his wonderful library. (…) But since on the ship of eternity you cannot exceed a certain weight by an ounce, the Father has left us his most chosen love, just as St. Elijah once threw his prophetic mantle from heaven to his disciple Elisha. His books are now our books.

Only now Father Dumitru is in his own world. And we, who keep his memory holy, await his mystical successor.

(Fr. Ioan Buga – Where was the Church, St. George the Elder Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 108-116)