On Tutea

 From January to April 1938 Tutea contributed articles to a well-known column on political economy in Cuvantul (The Word), edited by his mentor Nae Ionescu.

Ionescu was a charismatic university lecturer in logic and metaphysics whose concept of trairism (or 'experientialism') became the model for young intellectuals in Romania and a boost for the Orthodox faith. More than an existentialist concept, Ionescu's 'lived experience' stressed the realism of 'inner spiritual life'. Like his mentor, Tutea saw mystical love both as an individual mirroring of divine kenosis (self-emptying love) and as a collective instrument of Absolute knowledge which can happen only on the religious plane.
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In the late 1930s and early 1940s many of the young thinkers who had taken a traditionalist and anti western position on the political right had to leave Romania.

Among them were: Eugene Ionescu, who was to become a member of the French Academy; Emil Cioran, Tutea's friend, today acknowledged as one of this century's greatest French moralists; and Mircea Eliade, who was to gain international renown as a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago. Despite temptations to pursue an academic career abroad, however, Tutea chose to serve the Ministry of Economy. On 12 April 1948 he was imprisoned for the first time under the communist government. During all these years, while his political views were evolving, lutea always remained a practising Christian, perhaps taking Holy Communion at Christmas and Easter. His so-called 'reconversion' was actually a clarification and confirmation of his genuinely Orthodox nature and differed from, for example, Sergei Bulgakov's move to the Church from a position of religious scepticism.
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A remarkable prisoner, when living in isolation he used the pipes in his cell to tap out services and Bible lessons in Morse code to the other inmates. As a dormitory companion of erudite Romanian academics in seclusion, he deepened his knowledge of biblical Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The political prisoners used to consider themselves as 'living manuscripts', while calling the prison the 'Great University'. Some of the significant anecdotes of their seclusion are strikingly similar to those recorded in the Apophthegmata Patrum. Strangely enough, they used ironically to call their daily prison records Apophthegmata Patrum Rediviva.

Reeducation Experience In 1949, at the Ocnele Mari labour camp, Tutea was included in the 'preparatory psychology group' of political prisoners who were to be 'reeducated' through torture.
The aim of this so-called reeducation was to replace the victims' identity with that of their executioners. The 'new men' were intended to become ' tortionari': their psychology was 'subjected to torsion' until they should confess to, and repent of, crimes they had never committed - crimes which in fact they themselves had been subjected to. The process displayed a sadistic ability on the part of the torturers to induce psychopathology in their most courageous opponents. Amongst so much suffering, Tutea discovered his inspirational preaching vocation.
With his fellows morally and physically dying around him, he offered his own life to God. When his young friends were exposed to extreme torture Tutea actually used to encourage them to consider their deprivation as voluntary fasting and to declare a hunger strike. At the same time he would give them lectures on topics linking theology and faith with culture and philosophy. Two of his favourite themes were 'suicide and sacrifice in the Bible' and 'inspiration and adventure in Shakespearean plays'. Tutea did not regard accounts of suicide in the Hebrew scriptures as models for pious imitation. He considered suicide a violation of the inherent sanctity and wholeness of the human body. Producing Shakespeare's plays, he argued, was a continuous process of 'discovering' Christian values beyond the moral message of his tragedies.

It was at Aiud prison in the early 1960s that Petre Tutea became a representative of Orthodox martyrdom in communist lands. Those who had undergone 'reeducation' (brainwashing) were required to make a public confession of their past errors. Tutea's 'reeducation confession' was a three-hour speech on the subject 'Plato and Jesus Christ: reflections on Christianity as consolatory religion'. Apparently the prison governor asked Tutea to redictate the speech for his own private records and told him that he would no longer regard him as an 'enemy of the people'. The priests in detention, who all listened to Tutea's public confession, decided to elect him Metropolitan of Aiud Prison without any preliminary ordination. Tutea refused humbly, but from then on the prison inmates and even some of the guards would ask to see him for personal confession and counsel. Tutea believed that pastoral guidance to overachievers had been given by the Apostle Paul, who reminded his hostile Corinthian flock that all historical achievements must be viewed soteriologically (l Cor. 6:9-10).

Rediscovering Hesychasm

Paradoxically, Tutea's spiritual experience was facilitated by his time of imprisonment. It was his extraordinary intellectual abilities which had made him an obvious target for communist purging of intellectuals; but it was something beyond these intellectual powers that helped him survive the visible world in order to take the spiritual way of perfection: 'If you want to be perfect ... come and follow me' (Mt 19:21). For Tutea, 'suffering in silence is the soul's sublime way to redemption', and 'prayer and kneeling are two halves of a whole, because God will not have us love him if we do not humble ourselves before him. ' In Aiud prison hundreds of inmates shared a single dormitory. In the community so formed the company of political dissidents helped Tutea deepen his spirituality and biblical knowledge. The prison turned out to be for Tutea a 'university open to God' where he sought to break down the walls separating the church from the world.

There he met Father Dumitru Staniloae, professor at the Theological Faculty of Sibiu and at the Theological Institute of Bucharest, who by 1948 had translated the first three volumes of the Romanian version of the Philokalia, the compendium of patristic writings on prayer and hesychasm. Together with him Tutea discovered the truth which had been formulated by another Orthodox lay thinker, Nicolas Cabasilas, that prayer and meditation on a spiritual level make laymen and priests equal to those who live in solitude. Both Tutea and Staniloae were highly educated but valued what they had learned from traditional village life.

After Prison, 1964-1989 Tutea was released from prison in 1964, at a time when the initially Stalinist regime headed by Gheorghiu-Dej had distanced itself from Moscow and was promising Romanian autonomy. Gheorgiu-Dej died suddenly in March 1965 after he had designated the young Nicolae Caeauescu as the next leader of the Communist Party.

Ceauescu would continue to develop Gheorgiu-Dej's independent foreign policy, initially also showing signs of liberalisation in domestic policy. From his release from prison until December 1989, Tutea nevertheless lived under either house arrest or city arrest in Bucharest in a room no larger than a monk's cell, with built-in microphones behind the walls which were monitored by Securitate officers day and night for almost thirty years. During the year before his death (on 3 December 1991) Tutea was cared for in the 'Christiana' Orthodox Hospital in Bucharest.

In October 1965 Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the president of India who was an activist for peace and human rights, paid an official visit to Romania. 

He urged Ceauescu to change his policy of violating the human rights of former prisoners of conscience. From March 1967 Tutea was, against his will, designated to receive a nominal pension from the Ministry of Health and Social Security. In July 1968, following a decision of the Romanian Writers' Union which had perhaps taken into account Tutea's phenomenal influence in underground intellectual circles, he was granted pensionary writer status despite not having had any book published. Tutea used to joke about this, saying that his 'books' had been recorded on tape by Securitate agents and that he was therefore de jure a member of the Writers' Union.
One of these agents came to see Tutea after the 1989 Revolution to tell him he had been converted to Christianity while listening to Tutea's secretly recorded tapes.

Tutea's amazing courage as well as his self-denying modesty, shared with the many pilgrims who visited him in his guarded eighth-floor flat in Bucharest, perhaps inspired some of the events of December 1989.
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Freedom as Monastic Counter-culture

Tutea's central view of freedom as joy fulfilled in obeying divine dogma is a continuation of the monastic claim that spiritual authority is supreme. In the third century, Antony of Egypt gave away his possessions and retreated ino the desert, and devoted his life to ascetism, attracting disciples who set up the first Christian monastic community. St Antony the Great was seeking to respond to Jesus' command 'Come, follow me.' These same fundamentally simple words stand behind Tutea's attempt to establish a quasi-monastic counter-culture. Turea consciously engaged in a 'viva voce' mission which defied the written character of the history of culture. He realised that antichristian censorship and political oppression return periodically and must be overcome each time anew by the oral counter-culture which has been recounting Jesus' message since the beginning of the Christian era. Turea always acknowledged with reverence the difficulties which must have been encountered by those inspired to compose the Gospel texts.

Tutea's life and works are within the Orthodox tradition which sees monasticism as a way of self-motivated, inspirational and non-intrusive mission. 'The man blesses the place,' says a Romanian proverb, and not vice versa. The monk does not come out into society, but individuals are encouraged to go to the monastery.

from Petre Tutea (1902-1991): the Urban Hermit of Romanian Spirituality
by Alexandru Popescu