Sandu Tudor, the soul of the Burning Bush

We must name the one who, from the very beginning, in his own inimitable way, inspired and guided the search and expectations of those who discovered Antim monastery: Sandu Tudor. With him came a style, for him a destiny was fulfilled. At the first meeting (and even at the following ones…) he often left the impression of a paradoxical presence (especially for those coming from a different background).

His exaggerated temperament, which sometimes seemed to take the form of verbal violence, in fact concealed an extraordinary sensitivity, close to the “fragility” of those who are capable of true compassion, of those who are aware of the price of each person: the more humble, the more respectable. “My dear, you would be unbearable if you were not extraordinary”, his old friend Alexandru Mironescu would often say to him, lovingly. At the same time, he brought with him to the Antim circle a gift that had long been confirmed “in the world”, the gift of being an inventive and tenacious organiser. [With a kind of quiet eccentricity, he had set up his “brother’s” cell in the very shelter of the bell tower, above the entrance vault. Objects, few in number, of ancient and hieratic beauty – icons, candlesticks, chandeliers, a few thousand books elegantly bound in beige sand-coloured cloth – compelled respect].

Thus, once settled in his new life, Sandu Tudor (in 1948, in Antim: the monk Agathon; then, in Sihăstria Neamțului, in 1952, after the first period of imprisonment: the hieroschemamonk Daniel) continued to exercise his “poetic” passion, we would say, of searching under – and above – the evidence, for what is waiting, hidden, to come to light. […]

About people like him, those who were close to him through contingencies, external knowledge, formal relations, one cannot write (or even speak). Much too complex (at first) and inwardly turbulent, refined to the point of a discreet sophistication that delights some and disconcerts others, ready to provoke a crisis with dear and definitively accepted friends[1], the man had an unceasing gaze towards the invisible that gives meaning to our all too visible reality. When he “returned” from there and shared what he had glimpsed, either in conversation or by reading the lines he had just writte[2], the listeners first received, vast and delightful, the sense of the unheard. In the form of a poem, an essay or a highly original form of meditation, carried out between rigorous reflection and intuition under the guidance of symbolic intelligence, the unexpected came to us. Or the “long awaited”, long desired but still unforeseen: with this arrival, reality is illuminated.

Let us, however, bring to light some – non-figurative – fragments of Sandu Tudor’s “impossible” biography.

Born Alexandru Teodorescu, son of Sofia and Alexandru Teodorescu[3], he also had a younger brother, the painter Mircea Teodorescu. Each of them followed his own path in life, so relations between the brothers were not necessarily close. […] Old Mr Teodorescu (he was 76 in 1946) charmed from the first meeting with his unobtrusive, well-tempered distinction, something – how shall we say? His son Sandu was close to him until the last moment, attentive, full of a special affection. It was from the midst of this well-ordered family that Santu Tudor’s literally “extravagant” destiny was to burst forth. Not bored with the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, where he had enrolled (1919-1920), he left it for the… School for Civilian Naval Officers. As a commissioned officer, he sailed the seas and even the oceans on the modest ships of the National Navy. […] In 1926, if we are not mistaken, he made a long stay on Mount Athos, which G. Călinescu mentions, in his own way, in his History of Romanian Literature. At that time, the Romanian Augustinian community was still relatively numerous and spiritually creative. There was still a figure of great stature whose memory lives on to this day: Father Antipa. Their extensive and long conversations, true contemporary Collationes Patrum, were immediately transcribed by Sandu Tudor and carefully preserved in his innumerable rigorously filed manuscripts[4]: he shared them with us on several occasions.

By the 1930s, Santu Tudor was already a recognised poet and writer, and was involved in public life. In 1932 he founded the weekly magazine Floarea de Foc, which lasted until 1936. On 1 December 1933, the first issue of the daily newspaper Credința appeared, an independent newspaper of political and spiritual struggle, edited by Santu Tudor. The collection, kept in the library of the Romanian Academy, lasts until 1938. Such an excursion could not have been without controversy and disagreement: the man, however, continued unperturbed on the path that seemed to be his own. An ardent “admirer” of the monasteries of the Romanian countryside and, as I have said, a good reader of old Romanian manuscripts and writings, he had also acquired a personal aeroplane. It was then that he discovered his passion for flying. One day, on his way to land, he went into a spin from which he could not recover and the plane crashed. When he showed me the photographs of the crash, I could only say that it was “unbelievable” that anyone could have survived. We were mistaken in thinking that the accident had put an end to his aviation adventure: the next day he climbed into a similar plane, took off and, on landing, re-enacted the conditions of the previous day’s crash – this time coming out unscathed. (Incidentally, this is a technique used by pilots to get rid of the fear that remains somewhere deep in the subconscious after such incidents).

The kind of collaboration that Sandu Tudor brought together in the two publications under his direction was also unusual. People who at the time were so-called “leftists”, such as Alexandru Sahia[5], Ion Călugăru or Eugen Ionescu, joined their names with Mircea Vulcănescu, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran or even Nae Ionescu. If the liveliness of his temperament was seen by some as violence or intolerance, the man was ultimately astonishing for the fundamental respect he showed for everyone and everything. Sandu Tudor lives on in our memories as one of the rare natural men free of vulgarity. Not – fortunately! – and the unmistakable weaknesses of nature. Taken together, all these characteristics[6] have sometimes led to excuses for ridicule or, more simply, to misunderstandings resulting from his “difference” from his environment. In the Apophthegms of the Desert Fathers, the state of the one who is grounded in hidden inner work and “despised” outwardly is weighed against the case of those who are outwardly glorified but hide the sadness of inauthenticity. [Sandu Tudor kept to the end the perfect elegance of the discretion of a true spiritual life, acquired along the way.

In 1948 the monastic hierarchical ceremony took place: the new monk Agaton was born in Antim. A year later, he was arrested for the first time, accused of “fascism” (sic!), “hostile attitude to the regime”, “activity against the established order”, which was a common excuse at the time. Together with Alexandru Codin Mironescu, I witnessed the stages of the trial, which took place in the Palace of Justice in Bucharest, before a new type of court: completely deaf to words, testimonies, evidence, mechanically applying the rules of “popular justice”, whose main concern was undoubtedly the detention of a quota of suspects already destined for liquidation. And yet a shadow of hesitation seemed to appear during the defence’s plea. Sandu Tudor was defended by a Jewish lawyer who kindly offered his services “in memory of the 1930s”. Since we knew the place where he kept his collection of Faith editorials, in the chapel of Antim, the lawyer was able to produce two articles from 1936 in which it would indeed have been difficult to detect any hint of fascism: “Gorilla with helmet and mask” (the polemicist Sandu Tudor commenting on Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia) and “Blond beast, brown beast” (on Hitler and Mussolini at their height). The court was forced to take note of the defence’s arguments. However, the verdict did not stand: five years’ hard labour, including on the Danube-Black Sea Canal. Released after almost three years, he shared with us the pointless horror of the regime’s prisons, without losing his inner peace or his eloquence. Father Agaton returned to Neamț, where, as we shall see, a first dispersal had driven away most of the Antim group. In 1952 he was given the “face” of a schemamonk under the name of Daniel in the monastery of the Sistine Chapel of Neamț. Some time later he settled in the Rarău hermitage, where he was arrested a second time in 1958.

(Andrei Scrima – The Time of the Burning Bush. The Spiritual Master in the Eastern Tradition, 2nd edition, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2000, pp. 106-107, 122-128)

[1] The extreme episode was the quarrel with Mircea Vulcănescu. Strangely enough – although such accidents were apparently frequent in the “writers’ republic” of the time – the conflict did not lead to a definitive break or to the loss of mutual affection. Mr. Vulcănescu himself mentions this in a text published posthumously.

[2] There was hardly a time or place when he did not write down fragments of his incessant inner dialogue.

[3] Advisor and later President of the Supreme Court of Auditors. 

[4] Further proof of the usefulness of his extensive “graphism”. It is easy to imagine the reproachful confusion that Father Daniel’s incessant graphic “fever” could arouse in some people: “Write in the holy shrine too”, one could easily hear him whispering. In fact, things are much simpler. Sandu Tudor belonged to a “psycho-motor type”, not an uncommon one, who objectively needs the act of writing to structure his thinking. [At the end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, Professor Mircea Eliade suffered from deforming arthritis of the fingers, a serious handicap for writing. When we advised him, like many others, to resort to dictation (his students expected nothing less) or transcription, he replied that he felt practically incapable of thinking without a pen in his hand.

Returning to Sandu Tudor, we happened to see him writing on the altar: it was the moment immediately after his entry into monastic life at Antim. We read what he was about to write: he was giving form, in the form of a prayer, to his new state, as if he were trying to interiorise the name he had received – Agathon – which he wrote in the third person…

[5] Of whom he spoke afterwards with great esteem, and whom he had helped in his beginnings.

[6] To which we would add his total refusal to compromise: in prison, weakened, under physical and moral pressure to sign nationalist, patriotic, advantageous compromises with the wretched political regime of the time, he shuddered at the thought that he might give in out of mere weakness. Death found him in this state of resistance.