Steps for Mircea Vulcănescu

…You didn’t know what to admire first: his unbridled curiosity, his vast, solid, well-articulated culture, or his intelligence, his generosity, his humour, or the spontaneity with which he lived his faith and the skill with which he interpreted it. I don’t think I’ve ever met another man with so many gifts. Nor one who surpassed him in modesty.

Of course, I have known scholars who dare to read in thirty languages, or who know the history of a country or a continent in detail, or who have penetrated all the mysteries of physics and mathematics, or who understand innumerable philosophical systems. But Mircea Vulcănescu’s mind was different. Once you got to know him, you understood that he could have learned thirty languages, or the history of a continent, or higher mathematics, if he had wanted to. He was interested in everything. What’s more, he understood – and explained to you – why he was interested in this or that discipline, in a particular author or work.

But there was nothing chaotic or disjointed about his culture. What he had learned from the theologians and philosophers he had read related to everything he had been taught by sociologists, economists, historians, financiers, politicians. His vast culture was not divided into “compartments”; it was perfectly integrated, even though it was spread over several levels of knowledge. That’s why he could take advantage of the reading of a reductionist – a Freudian, for example, or a Marxist – because he knew where to put it. As he often confessed, he was not impressed by “jargon” or “ideology”. He absorbed from an author whatever helped him to understand a cultural phenomenon better, that is, to discover aspects or decipher meanings that would otherwise have remained hidden or unclear to him. (…)

This Christian, who, as I said, lived in the universe of traditional cultures, was open to any creative innovation, in art, in sociology, in political economy. Many of those who knew him could not understand how a Christian like him could understand and speak so sympathetically about deeply anti-religious people and systems like Marx or Freud. Nor could they understand how he could like certain extravagant manifestations of contemporary visual art, or how he could so calmly witness the precipitous decline – heralding its imminent demise – of peasant institutions and culture.

The explanation was simple: like Nae Ionescu, his teacher and mentor, Mircea Vulcănescu believed in life and looked with interest and sympathy at every new creation of life, on whatever level it was achieved: social, political, cultural. For him, the Romanian nation, the state organisation bearing the name of Romania, Romanian culture, both popular and scholarly, with all that it encompassed and implied, had the merit, above all, of existing, of being alive. The fact that some institutions are changing dizzyingly or even disappearing before our eyes, that ways of being and behaving are changing and becoming uglier, that popular art is hybridising and the aesthetics of the slum are spreading like a sin, that the ‘traditional’ Romanian landscape is threatened with disfigurement by the very process of the country’s economic and social transformation that Mircea Vulcănescu knew and accepted – all this did not frighten him, although he was undoubtedly angered by certain hasty changes and pointless reforms. All this was part of the process of life itself. Here on earth, things could not be different, they could not be fixed like archetypes. But this life, because it was born here, in this geographical space, and expressed in the historical concrete of this Romanian people – it was a Romanian life, and however it manifested itself, it remained Romanian.

In this belief lies the source of Mircea Vulcănescu’s inexhaustible optimism: faith in the indestructibility of the fundamental structures of Romanian ethnic and cultural life. An optimism that, I believe, none of the prophets or spokesmen of Romanian politics and culture had. I will never forget what Mircea Vulcănescu confessed to me several times between 1936 and 1940: that he did not believe in the disappearance of the Romanian nation, no matter how many catastrophes befell us; that even a possible mass deportation or extermination of today’s Romanians would not mean the destruction of the nation, “because (and now I quote his own words) I believe that if other nations came and settled here, after a few centuries they would also become Romanians!

(…) There were some who wondered how true this belief in life was, and how real such a “peasant” belief could be in a brilliant scholar like him. They wondered because, they said, Mircea Vulcănescu was endowed with every gift: he was handsome, he was in good health, he had never been poor, he was surrounded by friends and admirers, he had not been tested by any personal or family tragedy; he had always triumphed, and at every level, even if sometimes he had not been given the place he deserved (for example, at 35 he was only an assistant professor of ethics at the University of Bucharest). But it was enough to get to know him better to realise that Mircea Vulcănescu considered all his gifts and successes as gifts of life given to him by God, and that if they had been taken away from him, it would not have changed his full confidence in life or his great faith. All this seemed natural to him. Because, he said, people usually forget that gifts, like trials, also come from God.

When the trials came, Mircea Vulcănescu received them calmly and confidently; in a certain mysterious way they became part of his religious life – in a few days he lost everything: wealth, fame, social and academic status, family, freedom. But he remained the same. He did not doubt or question; he continued to profess his faith and confidence with the same serene firmness as always. Others who were closer to him, here or elsewhere, will recount in detail the life Mircea Vulcănescu lived in prison. What we all know is enough to understand how loyal his victory was. A victory over the executioners, of course, but above all a victory over death.

For we know how he died!

And his last message from the prison, addressed to each one of us, was this: “Do not avenge us!”…

Chicago,
November 1967

(Mircea Eliade – Steps for Mircea Vulcănescu in Ethos, notebook 4, 1983, pp. 105, 107-109 apud Profil spiritual, edited by Marin Diaconu, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 117-119)