The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church has proclaimed 2018 as the Year of Homage to Unity of Faith and Nation and the Year of Commemoration of the architects of the Great Union of 1918 throughout the Romanian Patriarchate, given that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the realisation of this sublime ideal towards which the Romanian people had aspired for centuries.
The main factor which has contributed to maintaining the national unity of the Romanian people has been, and remains, unity in faith – a constant feature of our nation ever since its birth – given that the process of ethnogenesiscoincided with that of the reception of the Word of God; our birth as a people was accompanied by our birth in Christ, since the Christianisation of our people by the Holy Apostles Andrew and Philip coincided with its very formation. Thus, our unity as a nation is founded on our spiritual identity as a Christian people.
The unity of the Church, visibly established through the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost and planted on the blessed soil of our homeland through apostolic preaching, becomes one of the main pillars for strengthening the unity of the Romanian people. Hundreds of pages have been written about the importance of a common language and the role of the Orthodox Church in this regard for the unification of all the historical provinces of our nation into a single, unified and independent state, as well as about the clergy’s efforts to realise this sacred ideal; yet, at the same time, two other factors that made the unification of the Romanians possible must also be emphasised: the preservation of the true Apostolic faith by the overwhelming majority of Romanians, regardless of which part of the Fatherland’s present territory they inhabited, and the role of the Divine Liturgy in the union—not only spiritual but also socio-political—of the Romanians.
The preservation of the Word of God, received through apostolic preaching by our ancestors, played a decisive role in the unity of the Romanians, who felt united in spirit, not only through language but above all through the same faith. In most cases, the forced uprooting of certain groups of Romanians from their faith also meant their denationalisation, for by robbing them of their true faith, it was easy to alienate them from their own people as well, as the Prophet Jeremiah said: ‘For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have dug out for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water’ (Jeremiah 2:13). To turn away from the Word of God is to turn away from the one and only source, the grace of God, which holds our souls and our nation together in unity.
The faithful people have always regarded themselves as a unity in time and space, God speaking to ‘all the people as to one man’ (Nehemiah 8:1). The entire faithful people who follow Christ the Lord in and through the Holy Spirit form not only a spiritual unity, but also a social one: ‘And they all ate the same spiritual food; and they all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. And the rock was Christ’ (1 Corinthians 10:3–4). Faithful Christians have understood the words of the prophet Isaiah: ‘If you do not believe, you will be crushed’ (Isaiah 7:9) and in a socio-political context, as this prophet also indicates in the quoted verse, for true faith is the only foundation upon which a nation can be built. The leaders of the Romanian nation have always known, just as Moses once did—who ‘chose to suffer with the people of God rather than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin’ (Hebrews 11:25)— that only by preserving the Word of God unchanged will they succeed in ruling righteously over the people entrusted to them. In the preface to the 1688 Bible, Patriarch Dositei II Notaras of Jerusalem (1669–1707) portrayed the Holy Martyr Constantin Brâncoveanu as a beacon of light for the entire Romanian people: ‘You are worthy of a thousand praises, Your Highness, for you bestow the Word of God upon an entire nation, like a light that until now lay hidden beneath a covering, and you place it in a candlestick, so that it may illuminate the people of the Church’s household: the Romanians, the Moldavians and the Ungrovlahs’1’.” The princes of the Romanian lands strove to support the translation of the Word of God into the Romanian language, realising, on the one hand, that the unity of the nation could only be ensured through the preservation of the true faith, and, on the other hand, recognising the centrality of Holy Scripture in both ecclesiastical and social life, these not being separate realities. In this sense, it is understood that the ontological unity of our nation is a prerequisite for unity in the faith, but unity in the true faith also ensures and strengthens national unity. ‘There is, therefore, a relationship of mutual belonging here between the people and the Book. The Bible is nothing without the people, but neither can the people endure without the Book, for in it they find their reason for being, their vocation and their identity. This mutual belonging between the people and the Bible—which, at a deeper level, signifies the people’s belonging to God through the covenant—is celebrated in the Liturgy, which is also the place where the work of receiving the Bible takes place’2”. The main factor of spiritual and social cohesion is the Holy Liturgy, which is the Sacrament of the gathering of the faithful together and of their union with Christ and in Christ. The faithful, all participating in the same Liturgy ‘with one mind’3 understood the unifying power of the Divine Liturgy and lived in unity as one people of God. This in turn facilitated their socio-political union.
The prayer for ‘unity of faith’4 requested by the faithful also implies unity of life. In the Divine Liturgy, the clergy and the faithful present themselves before God as a unity, following the model of the Holy Trinity: ‘And grant that we, with one voice and one heart, may glorify and sing of Thy most honoured and most worthy Name, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages’5 This unity, reflected in divine worship, is also active on a social level: united in Christ the One Lord, believers must work in the world to share this unity through self-sacrificing service to their neighbour. True communion or unity amongst Christians is constituted solely in the unity of the Risen Body of the Saviour. Every believer is personally called to partake, within the Holy Liturgy, in the gifts that spring from the Person of the Risen Christ, and to be strengthened by the grace-filled power that flows from the Risen Body of the Lord. The closer a person is to God, the closer they are to their fellow human beings; the further they are from Him, the deeper the rift between them and their neighbour becomes. Only the Risen Christ can keep the faithful steadfast in ‘the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’ (Ephesians 4:3). The unity of the faithful within the Church is realised through the cultivation of love and, above all, through communion with Christ in the Eucharist, with the Body of the Son of God made man—crucified, risen and ascended into Heaven: “and may You unite all of us who partake of one Bread and one Cup with one another through the sharing of the same Holy Spirit”6; the faithful becoming and feeling as one people, one family: ‘May we find mercy and grace together with all the saints who have been pleasing to You from of old: with the forefathers, the fathers, the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the preachers, the evangelists, the martyrs, the confessors, the teachers, and with every righteous soul who has departed in the faith’7.
The closer a person is to God, the closer they are to their fellow human beings; the further they are from Him, the deeper the rift between them and their neighbour becomes. Only the Risen Christ can keep the faithful steadfast in ‘the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’.
The supreme model of unity in faith, and indeed of social unity, is based on the unity of the Holy Trinity, which is shared through and within the Church, as the Body of Christ. The realisation of the unity of the faithful within the Church is achieved through the cultivation of love and, above all, through communion with the Eucharistic Christ, with the crucified, risen and ascended Body of the incarnate Son of God: ‘and may You unite us all, who partake of one Bread and one Cup, with one another through the sharing of the same Holy Spirit’6
Thus, alongside the efforts of the clergy of the Romanian Orthodox Church to strengthen national consciousness and the unity of all Romanians, the preaching of the true faith, reflected in the unaltered preservation of the Word of God, proclaimed through the apostolic preaching to our forefathers, and the participation of Romanians in the Divine Liturgy, feast after feast, have contributed to the union of Romanians within a Greater Romania.
- 1
Ion BIANU, Nerva HODOȘ, Early Romanian Bibliography, Volume I, 1508–1830, Bucharest, Published by the Romanian Academy, 1903, p. 289.
- 2
Enzo BIANCHI, Listening to the Word – for the spiritual reading of Scripture in the Church, translated into Romanian by Maria-Cornelia Ică jr, Deisis Publishers, Sibiu, 2011, p. 113.
- 3
‘The Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom’, in The Liturgy Book, published by IBMBO, Bucharest, 2012, p. 168.
- 4
‘The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom’, in The Liturgy Book, p. 183.
- 5
‘The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom’, in The Liturgy Book, pp. 180–181.
- 6a6b
‘The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom’, in The Liturgy Book, p. 255.
- 7
‘The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom’, in The Liturgy Book, p. 256.