The Cost of Witness

Stăniloae’s imprisonment was one episode in a systematic persecution of the Romanian Orthodox Church under communism: the closing of monasteries, the arrest of clergy, the surveillance and co-optation of the hierarchy. This file sets his suffering in that context and reflects on his characteristic reticence and endurance, and on the meaning of theology done under a regime hostile to God.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Persecution of the Church

The Romanian communist regime, established after 1945 and consolidated under the People’s Republic proclaimed in 1947, was militantly atheist and set itself to subdue the Orthodox Church that was the faith of the great majority of Romanians (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on the communist regime and the Church). Its strategy combined open repression with subtler forms of control. On the one hand, it suppressed the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church outright in 1948, arrested clergy and laity, and imprisoned those it judged dangerous — among them the Rugul Aprins circle and Stăniloae himself (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the repression; see Imprisonment at Aiud). On the other, it sought to co-opt the surviving Orthodox hierarchy, permitting the Church a constrained existence in exchange for public loyalty and pervasive surveillance by the Securitate.

A particularly severe blow to the tradition Stăniloae served was the regime’s assault on monasticism. In 1959 the notorious Decree 410 drastically restricted monastic life, expelling large numbers of monks and nuns from the monasteries and forbidding younger people to enter — a direct attack on the contemplative and hesychast life that the Filocalia existed to nourish (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the suppression of monasticism under the regime; see Monasticism). [Disputed: the numbers of monastics expelled under Decree 410 are given with variation in the historical literature; the sources agree that the 1959 decree caused a mass expulsion and a severe contraction of Romanian monastic life (see Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).] Stăniloae’s imprisonment (from 1958) and the monastic decree (1959) belong to the same campaign against the spiritual heart of the Church.

Theology Under Pressure

Against this background the character of Stăniloae’s life’s work stands out. The Filocalia, launched in 1946 just as the regime was closing in, and the Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of 1978, written and published within the constraints of the communist state, were acts of fidelity carried out under conditions designed to make such fidelity costly (Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on Stăniloae’s work under the regime). That a theology so serene, so affirming of the goodness of the world as God’s gift and of the human person’s high calling, was produced by a man who had been through Aiud and who worked under continual surveillance, lends it a particular authority (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the setting of Stăniloae’s mature work).

The regime’s tolerance of the later Filocalia volumes and the Dogmatics was itself a calculated and constrained thing: the state permitted a controlled ecclesiastical publishing under the Patriarchate’s Biblical Institute, and Stăniloae’s work appeared within those limits (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the constrained conditions of publication). His theology names none of this directly; but the reader who knows the conditions can hear, in his insistence on the world as gift and on the person made for communion, a quiet counter-statement to a regime built on the negation of God and the reduction of the person to a unit of the collective.

Silence and Endurance

Stăniloae was, by the testimony of those who knew him, a man of notable gentleness and reticence, who did not dwell publicly on his sufferings nor make political capital of them (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on Stăniloae’s character and his reticence about the prison years; Ware, foreword to Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, on his personal humility). He spoke little of Aiud, and when he did, it was without bitterness; his family and interpreters record that he understood his imprisonment within the framework of the ascetic tradition he had translated — as a participation, however unsought, in the Cross (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on Stăniloae’s interpretation of his suffering; see Imprisonment at Aiud).

This reticence is itself part of his witness. In an age of confessional literature and testimony, Stăniloae’s refusal to make his prison years the center of his public identity — his preference for pointing away from himself to the tradition and to God — accords with the very hesychast reticence about one’s own spiritual states that the Filocalia commends. His endurance was of the hidden kind: not the loud martyrdom of the arena but the long, quiet fidelity of a man who returned from prison to his desk and his lectures and went on handing over the tradition (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the quiet character of his witness; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). It is on this basis — a confessor’s suffering borne without display — that he is revered in the Romanian Church, though, as this guide stresses, he has not been canonized (see The Question of Canonization).

The Meaning of the Witness

The value of setting Stăniloae’s imprisonment in its full context is not to inflate him but to read his theology rightly. His serene affirmation of creation and the person is not the untested optimism of a man who never met evil; it is the considered confession of one who had seen the regime’s attempt to unmake both, and who answered it from within the tradition of the Fathers. The persecution is the dark ground against which the theology of gift and communion shows its true weight (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000). Stăniloae’s own generation of Romanian churchmen produced actual martyrs and confessors who died in the prisons; he survived, and turned his survival into the completion of a life’s work. That is the particular shape of his witness.

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: the communist regime and the Church; the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church in 1948; the assault on monasticism under Decree 410 of 1959; the constrained conditions of ecclesiastical publishing; the setting of Stăniloae’s mature work.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (Stăniloae’s work under the regime; his character and reticence; his interpretation of his suffering within the ascetic tradition.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. Foreword to Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994. (Stăniloae’s personal humility.)