Vlădeni and Early Life

Dumitru Stăniloae was born in 1903 in Vlădeni, a Romanian village in the Făgăraș region of Transylvania, then under Austro-Hungarian rule; the youngest child of an Orthodox peasant family, he was schooled at the Andrei Șaguna high school in Brașov and turned to theology after brief detours through other faculties. This file traces his origins and the formation of his early vocation.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

Birth and Family

Dumitru Stăniloae was born on 16 November 1903 in Vlădeni, a village at the foot of the Făgăraș mountains in the region of southern Transylvania then belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s birth and Transylvanian origins; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, introduction). He was the youngest of the children of a Romanian Orthodox peasant family; his daughter, Lidia Ionescu Stăniloae, records in her memoir of her father the world of village Orthodoxy and Romanian national feeling into which he was born, a world in which the Orthodox faith and Romanian identity were closely bound together under a Hungarian and Latin-rite dominant order (Lidia Ionescu Stăniloae, Lumina faptei din lumina cuvântului [The Light of the Deed from the Light of the Word], Bucharest, on the family and village milieu; summarized in Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction).

The Făgăraș country was one of the historic strongholds of Romanian Orthodoxy in Transylvania, a region where, since the eighteenth century, the pressure of the Habsburg-sponsored Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church had made confession of the Orthodox faith a matter of national as well as religious identity (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the Transylvanian Orthodox context). Stăniloae’s lifelong sense that theology is inseparable from the concrete life of a people — that dogma is lived in a community and a liturgy before it is systematized — has been traced by his interpreters in part to these roots (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the formative significance of his Transylvanian background).

Schooling at Brașov

For his secondary education Stăniloae attended the Romanian Orthodox high school (gimnaziu / liceu) in Brașov associated with the name of Metropolitan Andrei Șaguna — the great nineteenth-century organizer of Transylvanian Orthodoxy whose network of Romanian confessional schools had preserved Romanian-language Orthodox education under Hungarian rule (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction). The Șaguna school gave him a classical and confessional formation that combined Romanian national consciousness with churchmanship, and it was there that the direction toward the Church took shape.

His path to theology was not immediate. His biographers note that the young Stăniloae first tried other courses of study before settling on theology — a period of searching that is variously reported and that ended with his enrollment in the Orthodox theological faculty (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). [Disputed: the exact sequence and dates of his early university studies before he committed to theology are reported with minor variation across the biographical literature; the sources agree on the outcome — a decisive turn to the study of Orthodox theology in the early 1920s — rather than on a precise itinerary (see Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, and Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).]

The Turn to Theology

The Union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania in 1918, at the end of the First World War, transformed the world in which Stăniloae came of age: the Romanian Orthodox of Transylvania passed from being a tolerated confession under a foreign crown to being part of the majority Church of an enlarged national state, and Romanian-language higher education, including theology, expanded accordingly (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the post-1918 Romanian context). It was in this reconfigured landscape — a Greater Romania in which the Orthodox Church would in 1925 be raised to a Patriarchate — that Stăniloae’s theological vocation matured.

He committed himself to the study of Orthodox theology, entering the theological faculty at Cernăuți (Chernivtsi, in Bukovina, then part of Romania) that would grant him his doctorate and launch his academic career (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction). The provincial peasant’s son from Vlădeni would within a decade become a professor at Sibiu and, within three, one of the most original dogmatic theologians of the Orthodox world — a trajectory that begins in the modest confessional world of a Transylvanian village and its Șaguna-founded school. The subsequent stages of his formation — the doctorate at Cernăuți, and the study-years in Athens, Munich, Berlin, Paris, and Constantinople that reoriented him toward the Greek Fathers — are treated in the companion file (see Formation at Cernăuți and Abroad).

The Shape of a Vocation

Two features of Stăniloae’s origins are worth marking because they recur throughout his thought. The first is the communal and liturgical character of the Orthodoxy he was born into: a village faith, inseparable from a people and its worship, which left him permanently suspicious of a theology conceived as an individual academic exercise divorced from the praying Church (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the communal roots of Stăniloae’s theology; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). The second is the confessional seriousness bred by the Transylvanian situation, where to be Orthodox had been a costly and deliberate identity — a seriousness that would be tested, decades later, not by the Uniate pressure of the Habsburg era but by the atheist pressure of a communist state (see Imprisonment at Aiud).

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6 on Stăniloae: birth in 1903 at Vlădeni; the Transylvanian Orthodox context under Austria-Hungary and after the 1918 Union; the Șaguna school at Brașov; the turn to theology.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (Introduction: family and village milieu; schooling; the formative significance of his Transylvanian background.)
  • Ionescu Stăniloae, Lidia. Lumina faptei din lumina cuvântului [The Light of the Deed from the Light of the Word]. Bucharest. (Memoir of her father; the family and village world; drawn on here as reported in the secondary literature.)