Petre Tutea: Between Sacrifice and Suicide

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2008 by Gilder, Eric

Petre Tutea: Between Sacrifice and Suicide. By Alexandru Popescu. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004. xxviii 325 pp. $39.95 (paper), $130 (cloth).

Secular history has not been kind to the subject of this unique book, Petre Tutea (1902-1991), neither during his life nor in the larger annals of philosophical history. In life, he spent decades oppressed by communist authorities, spending years in Stalinist jails in his native Romania; in history, he has often been dismissed as a Socratic gadfly, known mainly as a minor member of philosopher Emil Cioran's early cosmopolitan circle. Although sympathetic to Marxism in his early days, by 1980 Tutea was saying, "As things are now, Socialism is nothing but systematic organisation of all that is inconvenient. . . . What we seek we do not find, what we find we do not need" (p. 87). In his mind, "Sacred and profane history co-exist, the truth of the former being unaffected by the dialectical illusions of the latter," with his concept of "supra-history" being defined as the intervention of God's grace into human history, that is, through Christ (p. 150).

For holding such suspect views, Tutea had been first imprisoned (from 1949 to 1953 and then again from 1956 to 1964), and then unemployed and closely watched as the "secret philosopher" of Bucharest until the Revolution of December 1989, after which he was rediscovered and embraced by intellectuals until his death two years later. He used the infamous "re-education clubs" in Romania's prisons to teach his fellow prisoners the interconnections between "classical philosophy" (the official course) and the gospel (the unofficial course). His "Creed" was defined thus: "Theology is knowledge of the Real, of divinity manifest in theophany [God the Father], theandry [the Incarnate Christ], and trinity [definition abridged on purpose to avoid static idol making] transmitted through sacred history and sacred tradition" (p. 145). Deification consists of the sacred and profane being ultimately linked in an "ontic triangle" via supra-history, a unified God-creation-humanity realm, despite human attempts to separate the spheres in the modern age. When such artificial compartmentalizations are transcended, sainthood can result; hence, Popescu's subtitle for his study. "The saint is the one who is rooted in eternity, who sacrifices himself and becomes a martyr through his sacrifice. He is distinct from the genius, from the talented and from the ordinary human being, all of whom are dominated by time. . . . Lack of vocation in the natural realm-where equality between individuals does not exist-is irrelevant to our truth before Christ" (p. 101).

To this reviewer's mind, Tutea's greatest contribution to Orthodox theology is his core concept of nuance, which (he argues) allows for the development of a wisdom in hope, which is qualitative and mystical, not quantitative and material. In this via negativa, "the Absolute" is understood "as mystery and incomprehensibility," contra both reductive science (concerned only with brute matter and number) and postmodernism (an attractive method, yet with no clear telos in view).

Tutea's methodology toward embodied holiness is materially grounded in a subtle understanding of "taste," achieved by "combining the superficial and the profound, the submissive and the intractable, gastronomic literalness and the savour of the divine sapientia." Consequently, "nuance is concerned with nothing less than the body's way of being that is 'the stature of the fullness of Christ' (Eph. 4:13)" (p. 235). Further, Tutea's methodology can be thought of as "a technology of the self" in the world's "theatre," leading souls through an understanding of "masks." The human's ideal role is to be derived from an integrated embrace of "vocation and inspiration" inside life, as distinct from mere detached "questioning and seeking" outside life. God's world forms the stage, the sacred scene, on which this process of integration is enacted, with the merely curious going through life in neutral, as contrasted with the engaged "doers," who live in synch with nature and its multiplicity, "absorbed in immanent truth." Yet, Tutea warns that this approach is doomed to fail unless other technologies of the self, such as spiritual exercises and observance, are reappropriated from a new perspective, combining the older Christian emphasis on "self-disclosure as self-renunciation" with the modern view of "self-disclosure as a creation of a new identity" (p. 200). This hard-won admonition is one that is most timely, given present disagreements, for alone neither pole of self-construing is a healthy one, individually or corporately.

A short review cannot do justice to this seminal work on Eastern European Orthodox thought in general and Romanian Orthodox thought in particular. Popescu concludes his most competent, comprehensive work (which draws upon much original research available for the first time to English-language readers) with a coda remarking that theologians in Western nations, who did not have to "endure the experience of totalitarianism" and are mired in an "ideology of consumerism" can only benefit from the "crucial lessons" spiritual writers such as Petre Tutea have to offer (p. 269). This reviewer wholeheartedly agrees.