What did Father Stăniloae mean to me?
Although I knew Father Stăniloae very well, I was afraid to write down the memories that connect me with him, remembering the verses of Letter I: “And above all, the little rune will speak,/ Not glorifying you… polishing itself,/ Under the shadow of your name”. Mrs Lidia Stăniloae urged me to overcome this inhibition because I knew him so well as his disciple.
The real way of addressing my beloved teacher is Pr. Prof. Univ. Dr. Academician Dumitru Stăniloae, to which one can add the other titles of Doctor Honoris Causa etc., but for us he was simply Father Stăniloae, not out of lack of respect, but simply because that was the only way to address him, like shortening the name of a mountain without diminishing its height and eternity.
Who knows what my life, or the lives of many of us, would have been like without Father Stăniloae. I was born into a family of well-meaning peasants who never missed a religious service, and my father was a church teacher. My ideal was to become a priest, and my greatest joy was to pass the entrance exam to the theological seminary of Neamț Monastery. I had a pure faith that had not yet experienced the waves of temptation and doubt. The biggest surprise was when I discovered that there were people who did not believe in God. I could not have imagined such a thing in my mountain village in the Trotuș valley. In my second year of seminary, a colleague tried to argue that the world had made itself and that God was a creation of man. I started reading all the “scientific” books, starting with “The Atheist’s Bible”. It hurt to think that I might lose my faith. Doubts began to eat away at my soul. In Neamț, I was lucky to have teachers who were patient with a child who had become so deformed that he only spoke in questions. A small man and an anthill of questions. When I left the seminary, I had not lost my faith, but it had all dried up inside me. I could argue and overturn all the materialist, atheist, gnostic theories, but I was no longer the child I once was. After the seminary, four more years – the Faculty of Theology. I loaded the back of my mind with all kinds of theological and philosophical knowledge, but I seemed to have no oil left in my soul’s candle.
Providentially, Fr. Stăniloae appeared in my life. I had heard of him since my university days. He only taught doctoral students. After the entrance exam, I even enrolled in the Department of Dogmatic Theology, which he headed. To attend the courses you had to have the “blessing” of the local bishop, in my case the late Parthenius Ciopron, may God rest him, who refused to give such a thing, saying that he needed priests and not doctors of theology. Fr. Stăniloae intervened and I was granted the “blessing”.
I had become so used to the kind of pedantic, shouting, frightening university professor that you have a lifelong nightmare of sitting an exam with him and not knowing all the answers.
But Fr. Stăniloae was something else entirely. Oh Lord, how can I find the right words for this prisoner of the Word? As if after a frost, the forests of my soul woke up under the breeze of the Holy Spirit. I gave my classes in a building behind the Faculty on St. Catherine’s Street. Straight as the vowels of Sibiu, with a beard and hair as white as a Saint Nicholas, when he entered the hall it was as quiet as in the light of the birthing chasms. He had none of the orator’s directed craft, with unpredictable rises in decibels and arms and their lingering in theatrical suspension. He wore simple but clean clothes. From his pocket he took out his typewritten course, although I have never understood why he brought it with him. Perhaps it’s what the Department of Religious Affairs requires. He didn’t use it much. He would read a few lines, then take off his glasses and begin to meditate, begin to flow quietly like a river murmuring among the stones, like a ripple of the Holy Spirit over the forests of our souls. We would follow the words in this flying way of learning as far as we could, and then, sensing our helplessness, he would descend again to us, taking up the idea again until we caught the taste of high chasm. It began with simple ideas. Like the word. Man is man through the Word, because he is the image of the Word. He is a dialogical being. In order to be understood, he expresses his thought through the word. This is not just a sound, but the expression of one person for another, a sacrifice that demands to be accepted by the other. In return, the one who has received the word gives the gift of another word, each enriching the other through mutual giving, the gift not depriving the giver, but the opposite. In every word there is a meaning that is realised through its reception. In this way, every human being is a word of God, the Word.
In turn, the whole of creation offers itself to man in a way that speaks, all things that have a reason of their own are a kind of word that nature offers us as a cosmic Bible. Man as a body cannot live without a natural dialogue with nature, and nature in turn has no meaning except in man and through man. The whole of creation converges on man, and his restoration as a human being tainted by original sin was made by the incarnate Word as true man and true God.
As a poet and a disciple of the Word, I felt myself taken by the hand of the Father and led to the altars of the Word. The first volume of poems, From Where Man Begins, is the diary of my clay, which is still being stirred in the hands of the potter who creates beauty. Towards the end of the year my bees returned to my cob, patiently cleaned of dust, spiders and despair. I had become a word.
In the spirit of Nae Ionescu and Nichifor Crainic, Father Stăniloae taught us about the “Church of the Peasants”, the depths of the orthodoxy of our nation. Many poets and writers of my age remember the meetings with the man who brought us the Filocalia in the language of Eminescu and the summits of Orthodox thought, which took place on Calea Moșilor or in the apartment of Mrs Lidia Ionescu Stăniloae.
In the Romanian word, Stăniloae discovered a destiny of our nation, that of its deification, in which Savaot approaches us as in wooden icons, kind and forgiving, and the Romanian peasant expresses his notion of the transcendent through the goddess darling, a majestic diminutive of the beloved person, the person who gave to our history the “miracle” of our survival, incomprehensible to historians.
Romanian folklore is a heavenly roof, where God is present everywhere. Who is the shepherd in “Miorița” if not an image of the shepherd who transforms death into the wedding of the emperor’s son? Who is Manole, the builder of the church, if not the Romanian form of Emmanuel?
In contrast to the scholastic apocalypse, Stăniloae saw in Romanian Orthodoxy a specific mode of deification through participation in the communion of the Holy Spirit through conversion. If Karl Barth is said to have written his theological system with Mozart in mind, Stăniloae wrote his Dogmatics with Enescu, Grigorescu and Brâncuși in mind. He often spoke of modern thinkers and their pantheistic outlook. We would start discussing modern art and music and end up with Arianism, Monophysitism, Manichaeism and Bogomilism. We talked about Camus, Sartre, Cioran and all the cynics of Nietzsche, who led man to the heights of despair, and we discovered a new Origenism with all its range, from castration to suicide. But when he spoke of the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, his eyes filled with joy and his face lit up like a cherry blossom. Man was created with body and soul so that through the soul he might be ennobled, and through the body the soul might enlighten the whole of creation. Only through the incarnation of the Word does history make sense. So does the whole of creation. “He who wisely brought all flesh into being,” writes St. Maximus, “and who secretly implanted reason in every rational being as the first power of his knowledge, has also given us, humble men, as a most gracious Master, according to nature, in a natural way, the gift of reason, so that we may easily know the ways of the fulfilment of desire”. In the historical search for the One who gave us this longing, we turn with this longing towards the truth, ennobling ourselves, transcending space, because the edges disappear, and time, because we taste eternity. Man grows through deification, without losing himself as a person and without merging or disappearing into the divine essence. Stăniloae, through the spiral of the towers of the monastery of Curtea de Argeș, offered us a wonderful image as an illustration, an icon of the spirit of perseverance, of the longing that does not end in a circle, but is always renewed in new searches, like a spiral that is neither a circle nor a straight line.
Father Stăniloae was indeed a father. After two years of doctoral studies under his supervision, I managed not only to calm and clear the wells of my spirit, but also to find the purity of my faith, as it was that of my parents and my parents’ parents. I owe him my natural bridges to God.
As a teacher he loved his students and was loved by them. On his recommendation, the World Council of Churches in Geneva awarded me a three-year scholarship to study for a doctorate in Chicago and then Princeton.
Ten years after his death and 100 years after his birth, I light a torch from my heart on the altar of prayer: “Lord, rest in the immaculate light of your Face the sleeping servant of God, Dumitru, our Father Stăniloae! Amen.”
(Pr. Dr. Dumitru Ichim, “What did Father Stăniloae mean to me?” in Father Dumitru Stăniloae in the consciousness of contemporaries. Mărturii, evocări, amintiri, Trinitas Publishing House, Iași, 2003, pp. 205-210).