Trãirism’ and Existentialism

 

Trãirism developed from the thought of Nae Ionescu, whose philosophical term trãire (‘living-ism’) became an inspiration for the younger intellectuals56 between the two World Wars. Tutea was influenced by this, along with Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. The fact that Ionescu is not universally held in high regard today should not be allowed either to obscure his historical significance, nor debar him from consideration as a thinker in his own right. Ionescu developed trãirism in a religious and non-materialist direction. His horror of system, especially of Marxism,57 is shared by Tutea, who refers to Ionescu’s description of the system as a ‘coffin’, in contrast to ‘living thought’.58 He quotes Ionescu’s view that salvation precludes any sense of ‘frozen form’.59This fundamental emphasis in Ionescu profoundly influenced Þuþea’s own stance against rigidly conceived and constructed systematic thought.

Eliade and especially Cioran transmuted trãirism, as it was originally conceived, into a form of secular existentialism which, Tutea claimed, was itself a system incapable of leading beyond the ‘antechamber of life’.60 Secular existentialism ‘cannot accommodate holiness or heroism’.61 Hence Camus’s ‘radical pessimism’ and view of absurdity as the ultimate context of all experience, at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’62  Furthermore, for Camus, Sisyphus is almost a Romantic hero or anti-hero. Tutea’s criticism of Camus grows out of his very different experience of life – in its crudest physical and mental brutality. For Tutea, Sisyphus in Hades, pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again as he reaches the top, represents stupefying mindlessness, dehumanising emptiness, and barren stereotyping of humanity as a concept rather than joyful creative celebration of human personality in the infinite diversity and extent of its actual living ‘nuances’. Tutea regards what Camus calls obliquely Sisyphus’s ‘happiness’ as a form of moral suicide inseparable from the absurdity63 of his toil. Camus’s existentialism was simply concerned with existence, not life. Although Tutea appreciated the attempt of trãirism to engage with the totality of the human person, he was unable to accept the existentialist world view of Ionescu’s disciples.

‘Absurd indifference toward, and existential disgust for, the world are characteristics of the period in which we live.’64 Chaos (meaninglessness) and aesthetic anarchy, in Tutea’s view, provide no worthwhile response to, or escape from, the deadening commonplaces and clichés of existence. He rejects pursuit of the absurd, the gratuitous, and the grotesque as means of escape from existential impasse. He has no patience with Camus’s declaration (at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus) that suicide is ‘la question fondamentale de la philosophie’.65 Reduced to the level of ‘existential technique’, secular existentialism indicates a condition of drained communicativeness derived from a kind of colour-blindness in the use of nuance:

‘Lack of communication leads to solipsism, for which Schopenhauer prescribes internment in the madhouse.’66 Within a perspective bounded absolutely by human birth and death, existential pessimism and despair are not surprising, for existence is characterised merely by the futility of change, and by circular, repetitive experience (including failed attempts at escape). Because secular existentialists like Camus live ‘without hope and illusion’, their happiness is ‘inseparable from the absurd’ in which ‘Sisyphus forever shoulders anew his futile burden’.67 Their concept of movement being limited to this world, they can know nothing of nuance in the liberating, transformative, sacramental sense which Tutea offers.

As a Christian form of existentialism, trãire means, for Tutea, ‘mystical experience which releases the human being from the antechamber of life and knowledge’ and which, ‘through faith, makes the impossible possible in the believer’s heart’.68 It comprehends the whole of a person’s being, and leads to spiritual growth: ‘This is the sense of Nae Ionescu’s trãirism. Trãirism should be conceived in theological rather than philosophical terms.’69 Yet Tutea’s philosophy of nuances, as I will show later in this chapter, goes beyond the theological, into terms essentially sacramental in nature – perhaps (to suggest a different nuance of categorisation) a kind of affirmative liturgical ‘philosophy’.

From: Petre Tutea
Beetwen Sacrifice and Suicide
by Alexandru Popesku

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

Petre Tutea on nationalism and equality

We have been accused, we on the Right, of exaggerating the power of the nation. All peoples do so. The Germans consider themselves to be the navel of the world, the English consider themselves to be the two navels of the world, the French consider themselves to be the three-and-a-half navels of the world. Everyone believes his own nation is the navel of the world.

Romanianism meant, for our generation, that we should be ourselves. To be on the Left means to be up a gum-tree. Every people wants to be itself. And we also wanted, we on the Right, to be Romanian.

I am Romanian and, as a Romanian, I consider myself to be at the navel of the world; that if I were not Romanian, I would not be anything. I cannot imagine myself as French, English, or German. I mean that I cannot extrapolate my spiritual substance to another nation. I am Romanian by vocation. Everything that I think becomes Romanian.

If there is a science of nationhood, I am Romanian by profession.

Nationalism can also be practiced with decency. No one can forbid a people from living its tradition and history, with its glories and defeats. Pârvan[1] says: ethnicity is the point of departure and the universal point of arrival. I, as a nationalist, have long thought that the nation is the end-point of world evolution. When the nations disappear, we enter the Tower of Babel.
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In the French Revolution’s famous Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, the first proposition is either an absolute idiocy or at best a sophism: men are naturally equal. That’s as if Kant were equal to Iliescu.[2]

Men are naturally unequal. They are unequal members of one family, in which one can be brilliant, another mediocre, and another an imbecile. Hereditary substance is a mystery.

Equality is the greatest enemy of freedom.

The principle of equality, promoted by the world’s democrats, actually only functions in religion, because only the Christian religion considers men equal before God.

Note

1. Vasile Pârvan (1882-1927), a Romanian historian and archaeologist, known for his work on ancient Dacia.

2. Ion Iliescu, Romania’s first post-communist president, whom Țuțea considered demonic.