Isabela Vasiliu-Scraba
THERE IS NO
PERFECTION
IN THIS
TRANSITORY WORLD
(Nae Ionescu and Vasile Băncilă)
"It's not true that Nae Ionescu did not write. He did, and a lot of philosophy too, because whatever he may have been writing about was philosophy. [...] There was an air of composed and resourceful force about him [...] Never, and I mean never, was Nae Ionescu intimidated or at a loss; he was calm and self-assured, like a man who was aware of his resources and power of reply (here he even outran Iorga)"
Vasile
Băncilă
Known and appreciated by his
contemporaries on account of the depth, genuineness and beauty of his essays,
generously published in the newspapers of the time, of all Nae Ionescu's
disciples and friends-since with time, those who had been his students and
stayed around him would somewhat naturally become his friends-, Vasile Băncilă
had the honor to be present in the first volume of Nae Ionescu's philosophical
works as the author of the foreword. "I've long now deemed you as one of
our two-three most brilliant essayists," Lucian Blaga was writing to
Băncilă in 1934.
Making an attempt at sketching Nae
Ionescu's portrait, all the more difficult to achieve as around Nae Ionescu
there would linger "a halo of mystery and excellence as a human
being," he highlights the Professor's exceptional intelligence, "that
was his most appreciated asset," as well as "the strong feeling of
his own ego, the strength of which was utterly interiorized and more often than
not wrapt into smooth fluidities and into an undertone or transfiguration that
would sometimes verge on Christian humility." Aware that in time "was
given the equation and drama of man's salvation struggle," Nae Ionescu
also knew that, beyond organic time (the condition to achieve life), there is
an atemporal perfection, with its own essences and wills, as Vasile Băncilă put
it, "static and eternal as it is alive. A bit from Plato, a bit from
Parmenides, with a lot of Christian hue and high Christian-Orthodox precision."
With Nae Ionescu, living and
understanding the metaphysical values of existence were all the more remarkable
as the spirit of the time, as early as then, tended to exclude any shade of
transcendence as science and technology developed, prevalent becoming the
flight from the real self, the refuge into the world of senses, into the
relative and into the illusion that human beings are self-sufficient; or, in
the field of culture, into shallow intellectualism and aestehticism, or in
compemnsatory metaphysics, called by Băncilă "surrogate metaphysics,"
such as the absolute of the arts and the commentaries on the margin of science,
made from the vantage of positivist relativism that proclaimed the
subject-object sovereignty in cognition.
To Nae Ionescu, somehow following in
Plato's footsteps, the metaphysical research of reality did not mean making it
poorer. On the contrary, it led to its strengthening through knowledge and
understanding, which placed the true metaphysical cognition in the realm of
"living experience." There are in the real life "fix forms,
identical to themselves," said Nae Ionescu in his course of metaphysics he
held in 1928-1929. However, their identity does not come from the forms of
organization of the human mind; they belong to reality itself, they are the
essence of reality, its structural principle of a spiritual nature. The organic
understanding of reality may lead to a static valuation of the universe, and
not a dynamic one as Aristotle stated. In this kind of metaphysical outlook on
reality, Nae Ionescu could with good reason assert that the introduction of
dynamism in the organization formula of reality becomes superfluous.
Essences prove to be subjected to
the principle of identity,without becoming in this way material, or mere
functions of our intellect, without being artificial constructions, but
realities. No one has felt more powerfully than Nae Ionescu the permanent
becoming and the fact that there is no perfection in this transitory world,
that "fixity spells artificialization, death [...] But beyond that, in the
most real and ideal world, perfection is living at full throttle, it is the
supreme act," noted Băncilă in his foreword.
In history, Nae Ionescu "saw
particularly the ethnic community, the nation. And in metaphysics, especially
God. Therefore, at the best of his ability, Professor Nae Ionescu was a servant
of his nation and of Divinity. Could one have a loftier purpose in life?"
Polytheism, said Nae Ionescu in his
1936-1937 course of metaphysics, is precisely the life formula that illustrates
the absence of a reduction of diversity to unity. Since, as God created man,
"man starts there where begins his unity, where he lives his unity."
At his last metaphysical lecture
held in 1937 on the discourse on "unity", Nae Ionescu interweaves-in
the whole-making vision of the metaphysics of the being-that facet of
metaphysics that we have called "Achille's metaphysics."
But, as Nae Ionescu's thinking was
alive by excellence, approaching new issues all the time, even at his last
lecture, where he had developed his arborescent outlook on life, he left
pending issues opened to subsequent meditations, "the need to achieve this
unity," along with the issue of the unity itself, seen at the limit
between the realm of the real and that of logic, an issue he had highlighted at
the very beginning of the lecture.
As an sustainer of a static outlook
on existence, in a Parmenidian way no doubt, with Nae Ionescu the final
interweaving of "Achille's metaphysics" within the metaphysics of the
being is as delicate as it is subtly achieved, with a thinking fineness that
only Nae Ionescu could display before an audience made of students. This is, in
broad lines, how this approach goes. God, as a limit of existence, is
"something at the limit of existence and somethinh in which we find
ourselves," He is transcendence understood as unity. When man manages to
live himself as unity, the unity he reaches is so extensive that, by living it,
man lives and knows the unity of the world at the same time, or the world as
unity, without ceasing to be a component of this unity. Man can succeed in
overcoming his own limitations, as once proclaimed by divine Plato, through
love, the only one to offer man the chance to become perfect (at human level).
But Nae Ionescu was well aware that such a being grown complete is not
self-sufficient, therefore lacking permanence.
Permanent are only "the moments
of imbalance of the community a person belongs to." And this, said Nae
ionescu "is not theory, it is a historical fact." The human
communities that make the nations are the only ones that outrun the individual,
while remaining "permanent existences in the long run." That is why,
to each person, the very reality of God acquires the limitation of the
community they belong to: "If God can only be lived within a unity, then
this unity of the community we belong to gives us the opportunity to live and
communicate together, within God."
The term designating the whole
humanity is pure abstraction, while the human communities (called peoples,
nations, or cities) are, according to Nae Ionescu, "natural facts."
This makes them be, each and every one of them, "an absolute conditioned
by no one and nothing, save by its inner law." That is why man, as a component
of the world's unity, cannot elude the very nation he belongs to.
At his lecture, Nae Ionescu told his
students that "Orthodoxy is the faith in a real, living God, and
Catholicism is the faith in an abstract God." Orthodoxy cannot be, as the
Catholic Church is, "transactional" for the very reason that it is
something alive, a presence in the soul of the Orthodox Christian. From the
religious standpoint, the Catholic formula of Christianity looked to him as
being a "hybrid," being made of Christianity plus the idea of Roman
state. Orthodoxy is more pure, "because it does not contain heterogenous
elements."
According to Nae Ionescu, the static
feature of Orthodoxy is illustrated in its essence by the Holy Spirit's coming
only from the Father, while "filioque" upheld by Catholics would be
more than a doctrine aspect that differentiate the two Churches. The coming
from the Father and the Son, observed with fineness Nae Ionescu in his lecture
of the history of metaphysic of 1930-1931, evinces an altogether different
theory of the judgment in logic: "all the Western dynamism is just another
form of Filioque."
In an article entitled ...And He(Got) made Himself by himself a
man (a human being), Nae Ionescu remarked that since the Renaissance on
"man has stepped lower and lower into the world of things, losing contact
with Divinity, to which he belongs nevertheless through his essence; he has
done so to such an extent that even to high religious consciences the angel has
become an ideal of perfectionism; while forgetting that, in a consistent
Christian cosmology, angel and man move along different lines; the former is
but an ideal of sublimating things; the latter is a step towards God."
Today's man is homo faber more than
ever before. That is why, noted Nae Ionescu in another article ("Citizen" and "Man")
published in "Cuvîntul", he is belittled, "mutilated in all his
metaphysical and mystical élans."
Striving to make a living, reacting
like "domesticated robins"-as Băncilă wrote following Nae ionescu's
line of thought-, city people have come to the point of underrating space, of
perceving it as finite. (See Vasile Băncilă, "Science and Metaphysical
Spirit", in the vol. The
Celebration Spirit).
In his need of placing Nae Ionescu
against the cultural background, Băncilă reviews the spiritual renaissance
moments of the Romanian culture. According to him, the first cultural
renaissance, burgeoned in late 18th century and flourished through the
following centuries, lasted up to the end of WW1. During that period "the
concerns were history, philology and folklore," and the Romanians' ideals
were "independence and national unity," therefore "organic goals
to the spiritual activities" (See Vasile Băncilă, Theoreticism).
After Romania achieved its unity
(1918), the second renaissance occurred, much deeper this time as it concerned
the spiritual and metaphysical planes, at a time when the European spirit was
undergoing a similar regeneration. The second renaissance, stresses Băncilă,
was brilliantly represented by "Vasile Pârvan and Nae Ionescu, of the ones
that are now gone, by Lucian Blaga and Nichifor Crainic, of the
contemporaries."
During the interwar period, no one,
not even those having the most variant political stands, would have even
thought to exclude Nae Ionescu from the gallery of outstanding Romanian
personalities as it happened when, far from Romania's borders, its spiritual
beheading was decided, by throwing the Romanian intellectual into prisons and
by taking out the notable Romanian creations from the cultural flow. Or as it
happens today, a decade after communism was overthrown, through an unfortunate
continuation of the communist cultural policy (dealing with Nae Ionescu) by the
same wel-indoctrinated satraps who, ever since their youth, have promoted, by
any means at hand, an as low level of culture as possible.
After the reintegration war,
starting 1920 when he was appointed assistant professor with the Bucharest
University, "Nae Ionescu worked directly, through oral teaching, upon the young
generation's philosophical conscience [...], breeding a thinking elite that was
to soon stand out in journalism and in creating valuable works." Knowing
Nae Ionescu well, Vasile Băncilă wrote in full-swing communist period how Nae
Ionescu "was dedicated to his friends and students: he would work for them
and offer plenty of suggestions. That is how he created a school, a trend,
moulded disciples (even from outside the University)" (Efemeride
naeionesciene). His disciples were highly gifted young persons, noted Băncilă
having in mind particularly Mircea Vulcănescu and Mircea Eliade. Would have
these young men stayed by his side for ten-fifteen years hadn't Nae Ionescu
been an unexhaustible philosophical force? Vasile Băncilă asked himself,
rhetorical of course, knowing the answer to this question much too well:
"they had what to learn from Nae Ionescu at all times."
"Initiated in the mysteries of
mathematics," Nae ionescu was "a great professor," Băncilă
wrote, like so many others, adding: "as opposed to Blaga, who relied on
books, like Wundt."
Among the notes preserved in the
archives of the Băncilă family we also find a parallel drawn between several
reputed professors of the Bucharest University. Nae Ionescu, Vasile Băncilă
wrote in his notes, "would come to his lectures casually, he would always
sit down, speaking freely and systematically, in a most original way." A
opposed to Nae Ionescu, "Călinescu stepped into the hall like a primadonna
confident in her voice and talent, without assistants. Vianu would drag along
an army of assistants, speaking doctorially, choosing his words carefully. Nae
Ionescu would always come alone, his hands almost at his back, displaying a
sort of indifference (or pompous composure) or artlessness."
In a short moment of optimism,
coming from his generous nature, since the historical circumstances under which
he lived after Romania's repeated mutilations could not offer him any
encouragement, Băncilă wrote the following: "History will do him justice.
Because Nae Ionescu was one of Romania's most prominent minds, the most
original Romanian figure in our contemporary history."
During the period of spiritual
effervescence that followed the reintegration of Romania within its natural
borders, young Mircea Eliade also nurtured the conviction that "the genius
always takes its revenge. Sooner or later, any personality comes to be properly
understood and appreciated."
Translated
by Ileana Barbu