I would like to begin by introducing the man I am about to speak of: the great Mihai Eminescu, the poet of the Romanian people. To do so, I shall draw on the portrait painted by I.L. Caragiale: ‘He was a sight to behold! A classical face framed by long, black locks. A high, serene brow; large eyes – through these windows to the soul, one could see that there was someone within: a gentle, deeply melancholic smile. He had the air of a young saint stepped out of an ancient icon, a child predestined for sorrow, upon whose face the signs of future torments were written.”
This ‘elite specimen’, as G. Murnu described him, was also, like all mortals, made up of body and soul—a soul that reigned supreme over this exceedingly beautiful body. His soul was rife with contradictory emotions, ranging from the most ardent desire for life to the deepest apathy—perhaps weariness, perhaps world-weariness.
In Eminescu’s work we find testimony to a courageously universal Orthodoxy, capable of breathing new life into the traditions of Romanian Orthodoxy. ‘Faith paints the icons in churches,’ he says in Melancholy. Here, too, he paints a bleak picture of the Church in a state of neglect:
‘And the cemetery alone, with its crooked crosses, keeps watch’, ‘the belfry creaks, the clapper strikes the pillars’. ‘The church stands in ruins, pious, sad, desolate and old…’. Could this be a portrayal of the Orthodox faith and its Church in Eminescu’s time? Are these four defining attributes of our Church? No. Certainly not. But we must remember that it was a time when the social elite—and, above all, the Church’s elite—were no longer fulfilling their calling. ‘For the Church, the elite is not necessarily the cream that rises to the surface through the free play of life; it is not what we commonly call the ‘social elite’, consecrated by birth, by titles or positions, by economic or financial factors, nor even by intelligence and erudition. These, too, are realities that matter in the transience of history, and whose value the Church does not underestimate. From its point of view, however, the elites in the highest sense of the word are selected solely on the spiritual plane of faith and Christian life, as the Holy Apostle Paul demonstrates in his Epistle to the Colossians, chapter III: ‘1’. The Church has its own ways of creating its elites, whose work must in turn support its activities. For elites, without exception, represent the most advanced stratum of a society, emanating from that society and returning to work for its progress. This is the historical role of the elites 2. The Church values the work of the social elites and of its own elites, and hence considers that the lay apostolate plays a very important role in its life.
It was, therefore, a period of decline for the Church, for religious life and for social life. For our young people ‘in Paris are learning how to tie a knot in their neckties’, whilst ‘the fops and chatterboxes, the babbling fools and the pot-bellied, the stammerers with crooked mouths are the masters of this nation’ (Letter III).
Romanian identity now exists only in the pages of the chronicles. Who is left to look after the Church of this people? Father Petre Vintilescu used to say that, in religious terms, the Romanian people lived the Liturgy even outside the Church, their whole life being marked by the Church: “Indeed, the Romanian people’s attachment to the Liturgy was not spurred by the secondary need for aesthetic pleasure—for lack of anything else—to soothe the spirit. On the contrary, it drew them in through the mysterious power with which it stirred in them the nostalgic longings for an escape beyond the created realms of the cosmos, into the ‘land beyond the ages’, where the haven of salvation is to be found. Ultimately, salvation is defined precisely as the elevation of humankind to heavenly life’3 ‘Through the mystery that forms its substance and through the means it employs, the Liturgy was the only one capable of satisfying this aspiration of the religious soul,’ says the author.
He then makes a further observation: “By fostering a sense of union and communion in Christ amongst those who participate in liturgical services, the Church’s rites cement national cohesion through that consciousness of unity and certainty, proven throughout our history, despite the adversity of political factors”4. Here is how Eminescu portrays the politicians of his time:
And this plague upon the world and these creatures
Have no shame to speak through their deranged mouths
To bring disgrace upon the glory of our nation.
They dare even to utter your very name, O Country! (Letter III).
From time immemorial, the Church and the Country have been the two cornerstones of Romanian life. When the Country grew weak, so too did the Church.
There is in Eminescu an impulse towards theological reflection. I believe that the poem ‘The Prayer of a Dacian’ is the most representative example to demonstrate this. The first part of the poem consists of an account of the act of creation. The biblical element forms the basis of the poetic and conceptual development. In the beginning, there was nothing: there was neither earth nor heaven, nor even time. There was only God. As is evident from the poem, Eminescu was well aware that in the act of creation God existed as the Trinity. ‘The Trinity is the primordial mystery, the Holy of Holies of divine reality, the very life of the hidden God, the Living God’5 It is very difficult to speak of the Trinity. Poetry, on the other hand, can evoke it, for, above all, poetry celebrates and does not presume to explain.
All existence and all knowledge, says Lossky, are subsequent to the Trinity and find their foundation in it. The Trinity cannot be grasped by man, but it inspires his praise. Beyond praise and worship, beyond the personal contribution of faith, our language, when speaking of the Trinity, is almost inadequate. Saint Gregory the Theologian says that the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity ‘are not divided according to will’. This means that we cannot say: ‘The Son was begotten by the will of the Father’; we cannot conceive of the Father without the Son, for He is the Father of the Only-Begotten. Thus it has been from all eternity and will be for ever. There is no change within the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is God on the same level as the Father and the Son. But He is distinct from Them, for there is a division of responsibilities. The role of the Holy Spirit is that of an executor, the One appointed to carry out God’s plan. He is God in action. The Holy Spirit is the guarantor of unity within the Trinity.
Let us see how Eminescu presents the Trinity in ‘A Dacian’s Prayer’:
...Back then You were alone, so I ask myself:
To whom do our hearts turn?
He alone stood as God before the gods came to be (referring to God the Father)
And from the vastness of the waters, powers gave rise to the spark. (The Holy Spirit)
He gives the gods a soul and the world happiness;
He is the source of salvation for mankind:
Lift up your hearts! Sing His praises;
He is the death of death and the resurrection of life! (Jesus Christ, the Son of God).
And furthermore: God created man with body and soul, the physical and the spiritual. Not only the soul, but also the body is made in the image of God. Saint Gregory Palamas says this: ‘They were created together, in the image of God’.
And He gave me eyes to see the light of day (that is, the body)
And filled my heart with the charms of mercy. (that is, the soul).
Reading this last verse, we come across a plural form that seems inexplicable: ‘they have filled my heart’. My thoughts immediately turned to the Book of Genesis, when God declares: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26). Why the plural? Was God not alone? There is but one answer: No. He was not alone. There were Three in One. It is clear that Eminescu knew this. Mercy is the most precious virtue of the human spirit. The Three Persons of the Trinity worked together to fill the human heart with that sublime, enchanting mercy.
It must be said that the Father’s monarchy does not imply the subordination of the Son or the Holy Spirit. For a principle is perfect when it is the principle of a reality that is equal to itself, as Vladimir Lossky asserts 6. The Trinity is not the result of a process, but is a primordial given. It has its principle within itself, not beyond it; nothing is superior to it. The monarchy manifests itself only in, through and for the Trinity in the relationship between the Three, in an ever-ternary relationship, excluding any dyad, any opposition 6.
Following the poem, we learn of the poet’s encounter with the divine, an encounter resembling the biblical encounters of God with Moses on Mount Sinai, or with Elijah. God tells Elijah to stand before the cave, ‘for behold, the Lord is about to pass by; and before Him there will be a mighty wind that will split the mountains and shatter the rocks, but the Lord will not be in the wind. After the whirlwind there will be an earthquake, but the Lord will not be in the earthquake; after the earthquake there will be fire, but the Lord will not be in the fire; and after the fire there will be a gentle breeze, and there the Lord will be’ (3 Kings 19:11–12). God is not seen by the one with whom He has appointed a meeting, for ‘He reserves the Mystery of His Being for ever’7). Yet man trembles at the approach of the divine; he senses His presence.
Eminescu describes his encounter with God in a few words. He heard His footsteps amidst the roar of the winds; God’s approach is felt as tender music, music being the symbol of the universal language. Two lines suffice to sum up these ideas:
In the roar of the winds I heard His footsteps;
And in a voice carried by song I sensed His tender verse.
But the poet does not rejoice in the many and choice gifts that God has bestowed upon him. He wants more than that: he suffers and wishes that God would grant him permission to die. ‘For torment and pain have hardened my heart’, / ‘For I can curse the mother whom I loved.’
The extent of his suffering is immense. It is a suffering that transcends the natural. It is different from that in the ‘Ode’: ‘Suffering, you, painfully sweet!’ In experiencing this suffering, Eminescu renounces both Tradition and Orthodoxy. His suffering is not purifying and is not followed by joy. Even if it seems a paradox, suffering associated with joy is the central theme of the First Epistle of Saint Peter the Apostle. Why? Because God is joy! God reveals Himself to humankind, whom He never ceases to bring to life and to create. Now, this revelation is first and foremost the experience of an indescribable joy. Mystics of both the East and the West have been able to say: ‘Find joy and you will find God!’ Whoever loses joy finds themselves lost; they no longer have either a Path or a goal, for they are without a source. A truly spiritual life is measured by the degree of joy that dwells within it. Bergson said: ‘Man cannot live without joy’ or ‘Where there is joy, life triumphs’8
Philosophers maintain that joy reveals itself as the truth of our being, the pulse of being, the criterion of truth, and that joy and truth are one. Joy makes poets sing, for it is thanks to joy that their art is a song. Paul Claudel said: ‘Outside joy there is nothing but nothingness; to believe in nothingness is to destroy oneself, to place oneself at cross-purposes with spirituality and to wish to live in defiance of the mystery of life’6.
Yet neither poets nor philosophers can say ‘why’ all this is so: what is the name of joy, does it have a face? It took prophets, God’s ‘spokespeople’, for us to discover the source of joy: ‘My joy is in the Lord’ (Psalm 103:34) or ‘Come, let us rejoice in the Lord and shout for joy to God, our Saviour!’ (Psalm 94:1); or: ‘Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad… let the fields and all that is in them rejoice!’ (Psalm XCV, 11)
But our poet’s suffering is total, profound, devastating, leading to a profound transformation of concepts: hatred is equal to love; blessing and curse are one and the same. Only death can put an end to this suffering: ‘When the cruellest hatred seemed to me like love, / Perhaps I might forget my pain and be able to die’. In fact, the poet asks God for the impossible, that is, he asks Him to turn things upside down from how they have been since time immemorial, meaning that God should change and not he, the man: ‘Let me feel that by Your breath my breath is cut short / And in eternal extinction I vanish without a trace!” Yet God’s breath is the giver of life, not of death. Lossky says: ‘We are the word, the logos in which speech takes place. And it depends solely on us whether this word curses or prays’9
By virtue of the freedom bestowed upon him right from the moment of his creation, man can choose, without God’s intervention. And Lossky says: ‘God created man as an animal who was commanded to become a god,’ to quote a saying of Saint Basil the Great used by Saint Gregory of Nazianzus. But, in order to fulfil this command, man must be able to refuse it. In the face of man’s freedom, God has no power: He cannot violate human freedom, which proceeds from His very Omnipotence. Man was created by God’s will, but cannot be deified by that alone. A single will for creation, but two wills for deification. A single will to bring the image into being, but two to make the image a likeness. God’s love for man is so great that He cannot compel him: for there is no love without respect. The divine will shall always respect the hesitations, the changes of mind, even the rebellions of the human will, so that, in the end, it may bring man to a free consent: this is divine Providence... ‘God waits at the door of the soul, never daring to force it open’10
Another poem I shall dwell upon is Angel and Demon. She, the girl, is the angel; he is the demon. The angel falls in love with the demon. But he goes his own chosen way in life.
He would often climb onto a rock, wrapped
in a frenzy In the crimson banner, and his brow—rough, deep and furrowed
— Seemed like a black night shrouded in storm—
His eyes flashed and his words stirred up vulgar fury.
Lying on his deathbed, abandoned by all, this demon reflects on his life and comes to the conclusion that everything he has done has been in vain. ‘Such a death is hell!’ he thinks. In the final hour of his life, the shadow of an angel appears to him. It is the girl. The demon’s words that follow are like a confession made before death:
All my life I sought to stir up the people
With my rebellious thoughts against the open heavens –
He did not wish to condemn the demon, but sent
An angel to reconcile me, and that reconciliation is love.
In the Book of the Prophet Daniel, the story is told of the statue representing Nebuchadnezzar; Satan had taken up residence within the king. The king’s command was that everyone should bow down before this statue. Three faithful young men refused to do so and were thrown into the fiery furnace. Yet they were not burnt; instead, they sang praises to the God of Israel within the furnace. At one point, the king fell face down to the ground and began to pray. The question arises: what did Nebuchadnezzar see in the fiery furnace? Origen’s answer is most beautiful: he says that the devil within Nebuchadnezzar saw Christ standing alongside the three young men. But how did the devil know Christ? He had seen Him in Paradise, when the devil was an angel amongst the angels in the Garden of Eden, says Origen. The conclusion would be that, in one way or another, God makes His presence felt exactly when He needs to and exactly in the form He needs to.
I am convinced that Eminescu possessed a sound theological understanding. But even if this were not the case, the intuition of his genius worked in his favour. I shall attempt a Christian Orthodox interpretation of the poem ‘Luceafărul’, as I perceive it.
The story of the love between the two young people is, in fact, the story of the love between God and humanity. One aspect of the complex truth of the Incarnation proposed by the poet is presented differently: the Father does not agree to the Incarnation of his Son. What would have happened if things had been that way? We find the answer in Eminescu’s poem.
I have said that God created man for deification. But it is enormously difficult, indeed impossible, for man to attain such heights. Cătălina, an earthly being, is aware of the colossal distance between herself and Hyperion, the Son of the Father in heaven. Yet, as she cannot rise to the realm of divinity, she calls upon Him to come down to earth. She asks Him:
Come down, gentle
morning star, Gliding on a ray of light,
Enter my home and my thoughts
, And illuminate my life!
This is the maiden’s second call. This comes after the first time, when, refusing the invitation to go to heaven herself, she had said to Hyperion:
A stranger in speech and bearing
, You shine without life.
For I am alive, you are dead,
And your gaze freezes me.
It is clear that the mortal woman understood nothing. She sees him as a dead man, he who was eternity and for ever and ever! His gaze is cold, she remarks. We understand: none of the superficial and sinful warmth of the glances cast upon her by the young men.
Christ’s coming to earth, His Incarnation, was awaited by people; it was what they longed for. His Mother was neither the sea nor the night, but He took flesh from a woman who is saved through motherhood: the Ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Evdokimov says that a woman’s spiritual vocation is ‘to give birth to God in devastated souls’11 This woman, the Mother of God, ‘now stands at the centre of the community of the saints’12 Christ, whilst on the cross, entrusts His Mother to His beloved disciple, saying to him: ‘Woman, behold your son!’.
Hyperion heeds the young woman’s call and goes to his Father to tell Him that he wishes to renounce heaven and eternity, for the sake of the earth, whose life is anchored in time.
From the burden of dark eternity,
Father, set me free…
Restore to me the halo
of immortality and the fire in my gaze,
and in exchange
for all this, grant me an hour of love!
This hour of love has nothing to do with sin. It is a love that transcends the distinction between man and woman; it is the archetypal love. In The Mystery of Love, Paul Evdokimov bases his reflection on the two accounts of the creation of man and woman in Genesis, narratives which Jesus brings together to establish, within the couple, both unity and otherness. To draw on a profound Jewish exegesis, God created humankind – ha adam – male and female. Taking not a rib, but a part, a half of this as yet insufficiently differentiated reality, He places woman face to face with man. And this is the discovery of another who is nevertheless consubstantial with me – ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’. One can see the theological parallels that Evdokimov highlights with great ease: the mystery of the Trinity, the inaccessible God who makes Himself communicable. ‘Human love, in its original fullness, reflects the Trinitarian communion; it is God’s otherness that establishes human otherness, the otherness of the other, and His grace establishes the encounter’13’. True love is fruitful, “but this fruitfulness is not expressed solely through a child: it can also be expressed through doing good, through serving one’s neighbour, and sometimes through a shared creation”14.
The Father responds to His Son’s request thus:
I give you mast upon mast,
Armies to traverse
the Earth far and wide and the sea far out,
But death is not possible...
And for whom do you wish to die?
Turn back, set
your course Towards that wandering
land And see what awaits you.
Betrayal awaited him. The betrayal of man—that is, of the woman for whom he would have come to earth, renouncing heaven: Cătălina alongside a shallow young man just like her:
...And loud-mouthed and worthless,
you’d be just right for me.
Christ came to earth to save humanity. God had consented to this coming; indeed, the Father had sent Him. How did people receive Him? By betraying Him. On Palm Sunday they welcomed Him with palm branches and the song ‘Hosanna’; a few days later, those same people demanded His death. Did the Father save Hyperion from the tragedy that might have befallen him had he come to earth? No one knows.
Without any shame at being in a man’s arms, Cătălina calls upon Luceafăr once more. Only this time, ‘he no longer falls as in the past/Into the seas from on high’. And she then speaks a few words for all of humanity:
Living within your narrow circle,
Fortune smiles upon you,
But in my own world I feel
Immortal and cold.
The association of Eminescu’s Luceafăr with Christ may seem contrived or even inappropriate. But the sequence of events follows the same pattern: there is a calling in both cases; a change of worlds: achieved by Christ through the Incarnation, desired by Hyperion but prevented by his Father; a betrayal in both cases: Hyperion is betrayed by the one he loved and for whom he was prepared to sacrifice his own condition; Christ is betrayed, condemned and killed by those for whom he came to secure salvation; the existence of an ending containing defining words for them: Hyperion retreats into his own world; Jesus, on the cross, asks God the Father to forgive those who put Him there.
Without claiming to be an Eminescu scholar, I have tried to develop the theme suggested in the title according to my own understanding. I believe I have understood Eminescu. If not, if I have described a different man with different ideas, I ask him to forgive me. I can almost hear him saying:
‘And when I think of my life, it seems to me as though it were
being slowly retold by a stranger’s mouth,
as if it were not my life, as if I had never existed.
Who is this who tells my story from memory,
As I lend him my ear and laugh at what I hear
As if they were someone else’s sorrows?...”.
- 1
Fr Petre Vintilescu, The Liturgy in Romanian Life, p. 2.
- 2
A very important work on this subject was written by Prof. Ilie Bădescu: The Theory of Collective Latencies, Bucharest, 1997.
- 3
Fr. Petre Vintilescu, op. cit., p. 20.
- 4
We believe that the words spoken by Father Professor Petre Vintilescu in 1943 are highly relevant today, and perhaps it would be wise to draw the attention, in an equally elegant manner, of the Romanian intellectuals and elite who emerged as Orthodox after 1989 and who philosophise about religion, thereby creating genuine currents of inappropriate influences amongst young people.
- 5
Lossky, Pages Vladimir Lossky.
- 6a6b6c
Ibid.
- 7
‘On Israel and the Nations’, p. 30.
- 8
See Alphonse Goettmann, La Joie, Visage de Dieu, Visage de l’Homme, Desclee de Brower, Paris, 2000.
- 9
Pages by Vladimir Lossky.
- 10
Pere A. Goettmann, La Joie, Visage de Dieu, Visage de l’Homme.
- 11
Paul Evdokimov, Woman in the Salvation of the World.
- 12
Olivier Clement, Questions on Man, Alba-Iulia, 1997, p. 113.
- 13
Olivier Clement, ‘Foreword’, in: Paul Evdokimov, The Mystery of Love, Christiana, Bucharest, 2006, p. 8.
- 14
Ibid., p. 9.