Short note on Petre Țuțea

Petre Țuțea’s crisis of physical weakness began in the late autumn of 1991, accompanied by an acute crisis of loneliness. Severe headaches, a feeling of suffocation and a terrible fear of being alone made him “nephew Petrache”.

“My head is splitting with pain and I can’t think. I’m a bio-social waste!”, he would say, sweetly.

A few days after the onset of these symptoms, days in which, for better or worse, someone was found to watch over his loneliness and insomnia, the necessary formalities for admission were completed.

For a long time, travelling in space had become an ordeal for him, so he had not left the house for several years. On the morning he was taken to the hospital, Marcel Petrișor, a former fellow prisoner and the man who had looked after him for so long, remarked: “You see, Mr Petrache, it’s no use joining the liberals, you’ll end up in the arms of the legionaries if you get into trouble!”

Petre Tuțea, looking to his right and left, agreed. Mr. Biloiu and Father Voicescu seemed to honour their former political affiliation as they had always done: in a Christian way. It is true that now the terrible danger of being accused of… “had disappeared completely. But even so, now, when it was necessary, those who in the seventies and eighties had swallowed his words at the House of Writers or at the Athénée Palace, and those who until recently had filmed him, interviewed him or courted him with who knows what “image” interests, did not rush in.

I think it is worth remembering here that before the “revolution”, few dared to visit “Socrates of Bucharest”, even fewer visited him, and those who supported him could be counted on one hand. By the 1980s, many had forgotten that Petre Țuțea was still alive. Philosophers, literary scholars, people of culture, acquaintances were perhaps afraid of the Securitate, or perhaps they did not want to expose themselves. By 1982, the transcendental-meditative breakdown had occurred, and “a certain part” of the intelligentsia had become much more aware of the possible consequences of their actions.

In the autumn of ’91, Petre Tuțea was granted a leave of absence from the Philanthropy… There his physical condition was examined and the results were good. But he continued to suffer from headaches and the horror of loneliness. And someone always had to be by his side. One evening I sat there myself and, wanting to please him, I made myself available and offered to dictate to him. For about five or six years, his handwriting had become illegible due to tremors in his hands. Only Marcel Petrișor had dared to decipher it to a certain point, after which he too willingly accepted the job of “Uncle Petrache’s scribe”.

As in the good old days, Petre Țuțea began to dictate abruptly, commandingly, barely giving me time to open the book I had with me (Nae Ionescu’s Roza vînturilor), which I had read to him earlier and on the last pages of which I had begun to write:

“The Legionary Movement was a youth movement that wanted to build a Romanian state based on the ideal image of the Romanian people.

The concentration of enormous forces in a limited space cancels out the idea of great power. That is to say, when a medium-sized nation possesses apocalyptic means of destruction as an expression of its scientific and technical genius, the leaders of this state have a claim to epochal equality with the leaders of the great powers.

The concentration of immense energies in small spaces has transformed science and technology into sovereign and egalitarian forces of the peoples, with the breath of mastery.

Peoples are defined by their level, not by the level of the ideal, because the ideal is a supposedly ultimate projection of man. What defines man’s true position in the universe is not only his ideal, which cannot be separated from subjectivity, but also the attempt, through prayer, to bring down the absolute in man.

In the consciousness of the extreme right, the spatial and demographic borders of Romania moved in contradiction with the brilliance of the image of the Absolute Romanian.

The right was economically liberal, politically conservative. Thus, liberal and conservative forces met organically in the space of the Romanian right.

The ideal national state presupposes that the science and techniques of existence are subordinated to the specific way of being Romanian”.

At the end of his sentence, Petre Țuțea said he could no longer dictate and fell into a restless sleep. He woke up ten minutes later with a severe headache and was unable to continue dictating.

And for those who might be surprised by these other words of Petre Țuțea, it should be remembered that during the re-education in Aiud, around Christmas 1963, the prison warden, believing that he was being re-educated, made the prisoner Petre Țuțea talk about legionnaireism. Petre Țuțea agreed and spoke in glowing terms, saying, among other things, that the legionnaire was “a knight without reproach, wandering through the jungle of his time”. And, strangely enough, although he was listening, Colonel Crăciun did not interrupt him… Simion Ghinea, a friend of Petre Țuțea, recalled what he considered “the most beautiful compliment Petre Țuțea paid to the Legionary Movement”:

“I was in Ocnele Mari in 1953. There, too, the principles of re-education had begun to be applied. A new Pitesti seemed to be fulfilling its curse on our flesh and souls. Nea Petrică had reached the antechamber of hell. They had taken us to the cell next to the one where the devil begged. The screams of the torturers and the victims, mixed together, gave truth to what was unbelievable. Suddenly, my nephew Peter said to me: I am immortal! Alarmed for a moment, thinking he had gone mad, I hurried to ask him: Why do you think that? And the answer came quickly: Because the Movement is immortal…”.

(Lucian D. Popescu – razvan-codrescu.blogspot.com)

Comment on the article:

This short text about Petre Țuțea, which my friend Lucian D. Popescu recently found among his older papers, is perhaps uncomfortable in many ways. It is very difficult to judge Petre Țuțea then, as it is very difficult to judge Father Iustin Pârvu now. The fact is that the Legionary adventure, despite all its abuses or failures (which the critical perspective of history cannot overlook), deeply marked a generation, including its cultural or spiritual heights. The phenomenon should be studied not so much for its possible revival (no historical experience can be repeated as such, outside the context that generated it), but in order to understand the fascination that could lead men of such calibre to embrace and commit themselves to death – yesterday at the risk of losing their freedom, today at the risk of losing their public image – an ideal that has been so controversial throughout the ages. It is easy to avoid discussion, or to respond in terms of current patterns of thought. It is much more difficult to accept the challenge of reality and try to explain the phenomenon, with all due respect to people who, far from being reduced to it, have many other qualities (spiritual, moral, cultural, civic, professional) that define and recommend them. Neither Petre Țuțea is less brilliant, nor Father Iustin, in one way or another, less hardened to legionnaireism. But it is also true that neither the genius of the one nor the holiness of the other can wipe out certain historical excesses for which they are not or cannot be held personally responsible. Man’s passage through time, with its good and bad, is something complex and unrepeatable, which defies simplistic judgement.

In the case of Petre Țuțea, the subject of this article, things are complicated by a number of unknowns and paradoxes: he started out ideologically on the left (socialist peasantry and romantic communism), turned to the right (even to the most extreme legionnaireism), but died as a member of the … liberal party. Curiously, when Antonescu violently broke with the Legionaries after the “rebellion” of January 1941 (killing them, throwing them out of public office, throwing them into camps and prisons, or sending them to the front), Petre Țuțea – to whom he so stubbornly attributed or attributed himself to Legionarism – remained happily in his post as a ministerial official in the economic field, without any major inconveniences. What’s more, we find him in his post even after the fall of Antonescu, throughout the “capitular” regime (anti-Legionnaire and anti-Antonescu alike), with Gheorghiu-Dej (in 1948!) removing him from the ministerial apparatus (and subsequently throwing him in prison). These are strange and obscure aspects (and they are not the only ones), both in the biography of the illustrious figure and in the historical course of our public life.

Let’s say that what a witness born in 1967 (today a judge and theologian) tells us below can be partly attributed to the confused fears of Țuțea’s senility. But those who knew him before that knew very well that there was nothing that “nephew Petrache” did not say in various contexts during the last decades of his life. He was a pendulum, not easy to analyse, between conservatism and liberalism, between dithyrambic legionnaireism and disabused legionnaireism, between exalting the principles of Romanianism and criticising its state of affairs. The final – and stubbornly vivid – impression is that of a man too big for such a small world, unable to live up to his visions and ideals (and those of an entire generation seduced by the utopian grandeur of a different “Romanian destiny”).

(Răzvan Codrescu)