Romani

The Generation Of '27, Between The Holocaust And The Gulag

excerpt After the year when its first program was launched, namely Mircea Eliade's Spiritual Itinerary, the generation of '27 (or the young generation, the generation of the '30s, the generation that lived life for life's sake, the experiential and Orthodox

The Manifesto Of The White Lily, 1928

excerpts The lashes against the young generation are relentless. They have all befallen us at once, like pelts of heavy rain. The pundits charge anew and huff heavily, seconded by verbose mercenaries that bounce off like loose cannonballs of tennis. All the nuances of

A Certain Incapacity

The ultimate test for everyone – therefore for nations too – is the capacity to contemplate while suffering. The Asians, the Chinese and the Indians in particular, are definitely superior to us from this point of view. These people give so much importance to contemplation

Sleep

Heraclitus says that bards, sycophants or mystagogues behave like people asleep when they are awake, looking towards their personal world, while people who are awake only have one single world, which is common to all of them. If this quote had been seen by Constantin Noica

Proto-History Or The Middle Ages

The European nations are divided into two main groups: those which had a glorious Middle Ages period out of whose crises the Renaissance came out, and those which had a minimal, insignificant, derived one. The former created most of the civil, spiritual and cultural history

The Second Independence, 1926

There is a technique of the life of the matter and a technique of the life of the soul. One is the result of scientific findings and inventions based on precise and universally valid laws; the other is the result of long-wearing inner experiences of man with himself, with

Lecture On The Philosophy Of Religion, 1924-1925

excerpts XIV. The structure of the secondary determinations of the divine8. On the spiritual dimension of the Christian Orthodox  But what is exactly the spiritual dimension? For example, if we are aware of the fact that we are Christians, in this daily statement: I am

Religion And Identity In Interwar Romania: Orthodoxism

In the two decades between the world wars the majority of Romanian intellectuals were engaged in a grand debate about what it meant to be Romanian and how national character determined social and political development. [1] The ideological commitments of the protagonists

The Children's Corner

1. The Virgin Mary with the Child, Orthodox icon, 17th century 2. Constantin Brancovan and his family 3. Ştefan Luchian (1868-1916), The Washing (see also Gallery) Romanian painters met the Child long before local art itself was born, in the modern sense of the word (the

All Those Images

Early Sunday afternoon, lying in bed with a large illustrated book of Ion Creangă stories, Memories of Childhood Days: the time stood still, waiting for me to turn over the pages, and I had all the time in the world. My father was sitting next to me reading too, but I was

Novel Of The Nearsighted Adolescent

excerpt  VI. MONDAY, 8 TO 9, GERMAN When I was in the first grade, I flunked French, German and Romanian. I used to spend my afternoons barefoot on the pitch, sweating, short-sighted, playing oina. [1] I had become famous for the lightning rapidity with which I would catch

The Life And Times Of Andrei Mihai Stan

Writing an oral history of a ten-year-old child may seem like a perfectly absurd enterprise any day of the week. The social experience of an individual of ten would not recommend an approach of this kind. With such a person it cannot be a matter of immediate memory. Hence