Imprisonment at Aiud

In 1958 Stăniloae was arrested by the communist authorities, caught up in the crackdown on the “Burning Bush” (Rugul Aprins) circle of intellectuals and monks; he was sentenced and imprisoned, spending years in the notorious prison at Aiud before his release in the early 1960s. This file narrates the imprisonment, flagging the points where the dates and details vary across sources.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Rugul Aprins and the Crackdown

In the years after the Second World War, as the communist regime consolidated its hold on Romania, a circle of intellectuals, writers, monks, and clergy had gathered around the Antim Monastery in Bucharest in a movement of spiritual renewal that came to be called the Rugul Aprins — the “Burning Bush.” Devoted to the Jesus Prayer, patristic study, and the hesychast tradition, it drew figures such as the poet-monk Sandu Tudor (later the hieromonk Daniil), the writer Vasile Voiculescu, and other theologians and intellectuals; Stăniloae was associated with this milieu of Philokalic spiritual revival (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae, the Rugul Aprins circle, and his arrest; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on the arrest and imprisonment).

In the late 1950s the regime moved to destroy this circle. The authorities regarded the Burning Bush as a nucleus of “mystical” and potentially subversive activity, and in 1958 they arrested its members and associates in a group trial, on the fabricated or inflated charges characteristic of the period — conspiracy against the social order, hostile “mystical-legionary” activity, and the like (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the Rugul Aprins trial and the political charges; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the circumstances of the arrest). Stăniloae was among those swept up.

Arrest, Trial, and Sentence

Stăniloae was arrested in 1958 and tried with the other members of the circle; he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment and sent to prison (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, dating the arrest to 1958; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the sentence and imprisonment). [Disputed: the length of the sentence and the exact span of imprisonment are given with some variation across the biographical literature. The sources agree that he was arrested in 1958 and released in the early 1960s (most commonly 1963, in the general amnesty of political prisoners that the regime carried out in 1962–1964); the reported sentence is often given as five years. Because the accounts vary in detail, this guide gives the span as c. 1958–1963 rather than asserting a single figure (see Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, and Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000).]

The charges, like those against the whole Rugul Aprins group, belonged to the standard repertoire of the Romanian communist security apparatus: the suppression of an independent spiritual and intellectual life dressed up as the prosecution of political crime. Stăniloae’s real “offense” was the one for which the regime had no legal name — that he was a serious Orthodox theologian, a teacher of the hesychast tradition, and a man whose loyalties lay beyond the reach of the Party (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the character of the charges; see The Cost of Witness).

Aiud

Stăniloae was imprisoned at Aiud, one of the most notorious prisons in communist Romania, where many political prisoners, clergy, and intellectuals were held under brutal conditions (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, placing Stăniloae’s imprisonment at Aiud; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the years at Aiud). The Romanian prison system of the period was designed not merely to detain but to break its prisoners physically and spiritually; the regime of hunger, cold, forced labor, isolation, and interrogation at prisons such as Aiud, Gherla, Pitești, and the Danube canal camps is among the darkest chapters of the communist era (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the conditions of imprisonment).

Stăniloae spoke sparingly of his prison years afterward, but what he and his family did convey is that the ascetic and prayer tradition he had spent his life translating — the very tradition of the Filocalia — sustained him in prison; the interior discipline of the Jesus Prayer and the memory of the Fathers became not scholarship but survival (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on prayer as Stăniloae’s sustenance in prison; Lidia Ionescu Stăniloae, memoir of her father, on the prison years, as reported in the secondary literature). His interpreters note the poignant continuity: the man who had made the hesychast tradition available to modern Romania was himself held up by that tradition in the regime’s prison (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000).

Release

He was released in the early 1960s — most sources say 1963 — in the context of the regime’s amnesties of political prisoners, and after a period of continued marginalization he was eventually able to return to his teaching at the Theological Institute in Bucharest (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the release and eventual return to teaching; see Rehabilitation and Recognition). The interruption of the Filocalia project maps this ordeal: the four Sibiu volumes of the late 1940s were followed by a long silence, and the project resumed only in the 1970s, after his release and rehabilitation (see The Filocalia Translation).

That Stăniloae emerged from Aiud to complete the Filocalia and to write the Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of 1978 gives his later work the character of a witness borne through suffering. He is honored in the Romanian Church not only as its greatest theologian but as a confessor — one who suffered imprisonment for his faith and his fidelity to the Church’s tradition — even though, as this guide is careful to note, he has not been formally glorified as a saint (see The Question of Canonization).

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: Stăniloae and the Rugul Aprins circle; the 1958 arrest and the group trial; the political charges; imprisonment at Aiud and the conditions of the communist prison system; release and eventual return to teaching.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (The arrest, sentence, and imprisonment; prayer as Stăniloae’s sustenance in prison.)
  • Ionescu Stăniloae, Lidia. Memoir of her father. (The prison years and their effect on the family; drawn on here as reported in the secondary literature.)