Sandu Tudor

Sandu Tudor (; born Alexandru Al. Teodorescu, known in church records as Brother Agathon, later Daniil Teodorescu, Daniil Sandu Tudor, Daniil de la Rarău; December 22 or December 24, 1896 – November 17, 1962) was a Romanian poet, journalist, theologian and Orthodox monk. Having had an adventurous youth, he first became known in the late 1920s, when he contributed to the modern Orthodox revival, rallying with the journal Gândirea. Although a traditionalist and a critic of materialism, he was closely associated with the modernist scene, and generally supported left-wing causes. Tudor was also a scandal-prone journalist and newspaper owner, who faced accusations of slander and was avoided by his peers.

From 1927, when he wrote his first akathist, Tudor made overtures toward Orthodox monasticism. Demanding universal metanoia, seeking to strengthen Eastern hesychasm, he joined other mystics and writers in creating the "Burning Bush" religious movement, and took orders in 1948. He was soon branded an enemy of the Romanian communist regime, and twice arrested for supposed political crimes. Tudor died at Aiud Prison, a victim of torture and criminal neglect. His body was never recovered.

Sandu Tudor is generally considered an unaccomplished writer, although his fusion of modernism and traditionalism has drawn critical interest. He enjoys a sizable following in the field of Orthodox theology, and, after the fall of communism, has been considered for canonization.

Biography

Early life and career The future Sandu Tudor was born Alexandru Teodorescu in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. His birthday, as recorded in reference works, is December 24, 1896, even though he himself gave it as December 22, 1896 (1886 in some sources). He had many siblings, including a brother who became a painter. After moving back to Bucharest, Tudor headed the Welfare department of the Association of Christian Students, It received a poor review from critic George Călinescu, who described Tudor's style as "baroque" and "superficial". According to Călinescu, Tudor imitated the art of pre-Orthodoxists D. Teleor and Mateiu Caragiale, without blossoming into a "real writer."

Tudor's other contributions as a poet and literary theorist were in the extreme of Romanian modernism, and hosted by the avant-garde journal Contimporanul. They include the February 1927 essay Logica absurdului ("The Logic of the Absurd"). According to literary historian Adrian Marino, it should be read as a "nihilistic" text, echoing the irrationalism of Dada and Futurism. In March, he contributed the Contimporanul editorial, a polemical text about the impact of cultural modernity. Researcher Paul Cernat sees in it a sample of "rather Futurist" Orthodoxism, noting its attack on the "supersexual" content and "gallantry" of minor modernism, as well as its praise of purity in high modernism. Taking its references from the modern spirituality espoused by Sâr Péladan, John Ruskin, and Jean Cocteau, the article postulated an essential conflict in modern art, between the "Sons of suicide" and "the warrior Art of immortality".

Tudor's other contributions at Contimporanul were short poems, heavily influenced by Futurism and Expressionism, but structured around apocalyptic Orthodoxist visions. As Cernat notes, Tudor the poet surprised critics with his "organic" assimilation of modern "purism", while his Gândirea roots were still on display.

With his synthesis of literary nihilism and Orthodox devotion, Tudor found himself at odds with the modernists' hero, poet-journalist Tudor Arghezi. In Contimporanul, Tudor had hinted that Arghezi's "pseudo-avant-garde" poetry was vulgar and hedonistic. Arghezi, a defrocked monk, wrote to inform Tudor that he could see no profound link between Orthodoxy and the Romanian psyche. As Arghezi had it, modernized Orthodoxism was only kidding itself by assuming the contrary. Tudor's comments in Contimporanul showed that the magazine staff was withdrawing from the revolutionary wing of Romanian modernism. Its conservative stance alarmed the radicals at unu magazine. They soon nominated Tudor as one of the authors who were sabotaging the whole modernist school.

Around 1928, Tudor was in contact with the young religious scholar Mircea Eliade, who was becoming an exponent of experimental neo-traditionalism in Romanian philosophy. Both were influenced by Nae Ionescu, the theologian and logician, theorist of an eclectic ideology known as Trăirism. Looking back on that period in his 1980s memoirs, Eliade wrote: "I met often with Stelian Mateescu, Paul Sterian, Mircea Vulcănescu, and Sandu Tudor. Together we planned a journal of religious philosophy, for which Tudor had found a title: Duh și Slovă (Spirit and Letter)." The magazine, described by Eliade as a would-be successor of Ionescu's mystical journal Logos, never saw print.

Dissident Orthodoxism For his part, Tudor still defied classification. According to Cernat, he should be read as more of a "church-goer", facade, writer than a "religious" poet. In a November 1928 interview for the journal Tiparnița Literară, Tudor was very critical of the militant Orthodoxist circles. In Tudor's view, Romania's Orthodox literati could find themselves duped by "a spirituality of the Dark one, very similar to that of Christ". He proposed that the religious revival needed to focus on "vigorous and harsh penance", with "the signs of a true confession". With Vulcănescu and Gheorghe Racoveanu, Tudor wrote the polemical tract Infailibilitatea Bisericii și failibilitatea sinodală ("Church Infallibility and Synodal Fallibility"), published on the front pages of Nae Ionescu's daily, Cuvântul (January 22, 1929). It presented arguments in favor of raising sacred tradition over the Romanian Synod's authority, and therefore in support of Ionescu's dissident stance on the computation of Easter (which the Synod affixed to March 31). In later articles for the same paper, Tudor challenged Church politics to the point of arguing that the Synod was schismatic.

Reportedly, Sandu Tudor never managed to earn respect the principal Trăirist figures. According to the Trăirist writer Mihail Sebastian, Nae Ionescu regarded Tudor as an amusement; moreover, others in the press simply felt that Tudor was a "cretinous journalist". Pandrea and Tudor first clashed around 1928, shortly after Pandrea published his White Lily Manifesto of the revolutionary youth. Tudor criticized the document in his articles for Contimporanul.

In 1932, however, the young art critic and political thinker Petru Comarnescu wrote that Tudor, Sterian, Vulcănescu, and Petru Manoliu were four of the leading Orthodoxist Trăirists (or, as he called them, "Experiencialists"). For his part, Vulcănescu recognized such a categorization, but noted that Gândireas Orthodoxism was rather antiquated by the standards of "our generation". In his view, Tudor was one of the few men who could fit in with both Crainic's old Orthodoxists and the Nae Ionescu faction.

In this context, Crainic co-opted Tudor and Eliade on his Gândirea editorial staff. The other new arrivals, reinforcing the magazine's traditionalist editorial policy, were Pandrea, Zaharia Stancu, G. Breazul, Dragoș Protopopescu, Vintilă Ciocâlteu, and Sorin Pavel. While this reshuffling took place, Tudor consolidated his reputation as a mystic. His passion for the Orthodox tradition was voiced in his first religious hymn (or akathist), honoring Saint Dimitrie Basarabov, published by Gândirea in 1927, and collected in a 1940 volume. Described as a "superb" piece by theologian Marius Vasileanu, it earned Tudor blessings from the Synod. was directly inspired to write his own Akathist to the Venerable Mother Parascheva the New. Philologist Elivira Sorohan summarizes critical consensus: Sandu Tudor was a "sub-mediocre poet".

Athonite pilgrimage and Floarea de Foc Shortly after receiving the Synod's accolades, Tudor left on pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the Orthodox sacred site. In effect, his journey had a mundane subtext: the Romanian writer wanted to testify on the negative aspects of Athonite monasticism. For some eight months, he was allowed to follow around, and imitate, a whirling monk who was held in high esteem by the Athonite clergy.

In early 1930, Tudor was involved in a debate about modernist theater, part of a "defense team" for the Expressionist Vilna Troupe. With fellow writer Ilarie Voronca and artist M. H. Maxy, he supported the Vilna actors and their mentor, Jacob Sternberg, for having broken up with old-school drama, even when their "lugubrious" productions had scandalized the Romanian public.

Tudor's own journalistic venture was the political and literary magazine Floarea de Foc ("Fire Flower"), published sporadically (1932, 1933, 1936), and having for collaborators some of the leading Trăirists, modernists or political radicals: Eliade, Manoliu, Sterian, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Arșavir Acterian, Haig Acterian, Dan Botta, Ovidiu Papadima, Camil Petrescu, Henri H. Stahl, Horia Stamatu, and Octav Șuluțiu.

By 1933, Tudor was also putting out a political newspaper, Credința ("The Faith"). Eliade was again in contact with him, but was critical of Tudor's shadier dealings: Credința, he writes, was secretly funded by an anonymous magnate, surviving on "political circumstances" and on "scandals", with Tudor's own columns being "aggressively moralistic". Eliade claims that he himself only agreed to work with Tudor after the latter insisted; he published his subsequent articles under a pseudonym, Ion Plăeșu, explaining that he was thus bypassing the exclusivity rights of Ionescu's Cuvântul.

Although declaring itself neutral in the ideological debate, Tudor's newspaper soon acquired a left-leaning staff: Manoliu, Zaharia Stancu, Eugen Jebeleanu. According to Eliade, they were only employed by Tudor when he realized that Cuvântul men would not join him on the "cheap tabloid".

Anti-fascism Alexandru Bassarab's Nașterea ("Birth"), engraving inspired by the Iron Guard version of Orthodoxism. The Archangel Michael watching over the crib of future Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu During that interval, Nae Ionescu and his Cuvântul were moving to the far right, aligning themselves with the fascist Iron Guard. Enlisted in 1932 with the more moderate National Agrarian Party, Tudor criticized the Trăirists sympathy for radical solutions, either fascist or communist, defending Romania's young democracy. In a December 1933 issue of Credința, he reacted: "We say that democracy is not the good thing for us, yet we have never even truly implemented it". Writing from a Christian perspective, Tudor accused Romania's revolutionary youth of "monkeying" foreign experiments in totalitarianism, describing Adolf Hitler as the Antichrist, and equating all revolutionary ideologies with the triumph of "animality". Tudor and Eliade were among the 31 Christian and Jewish Romanian intellectuals to have signed a protest against antisemitism in general and against Nazism in particular. Their appeal to ventilate Romania's "medieval atmosphere" was hotly condemned by the pro-Nazi Axa magazine.

Also in December 1933, Credința hosted a plea in favor of anti-fascist political activism. Signed by Stahl, the opinion piece proposed that political involvement was a civic duty, citing fascism as the enemy of freedom, and also implying that "Bolshevik" communism was "left-wing fascism". Eliade supported that stance, in the name of non-racial "Romanianism", noting that both political extremes advanced "a dictatorship of the brute, of the imbecile, of the incompetent." Also in Credința, philosopher Constantin Noica spoke out against the advocates of cultural isolation and nativism. His articles of 1933 and 1934 noted that Romanian culture was eminently parochial, and openly criticized Gândirea traditionalism. Noica also rejected the political ambitions of his generation colleagues. During the 1933 election, he recommended passive resistance and abstention, rather than ideological combat, as methods of raising awareness at the top. Four years before his own conversion to fascism, Noica's Credința texts described Romanian youths as being "diseased with politics".

Floarea de Foc was less categorical in its defense of the democratic state. According to cultural historian Zigu Ornea, who wrote an overview of Trăirism (published 1995), Tudor's other publication remained an "ideologically unaffiliated" magazine, and as such open to all sorts of political opinions. For Paul Costin Deleanu, the Orthodoxist columnist at Floarea de Foc, the legacy of Romanian liberalism was suspect, and Orthodox Romania existed outside the Western world. Deleanu's Floarea de Foc articles described modernization and secularism as a "betrayal" of "the Eastern cross." Eliade's contributions backed up such claims from an antihumanist point of view. He was suggesting that Romanian liberalism, an "abstract defense of Man", was a "dead, barren, inefficient formula", stifling "our nation's creative forces". Writing for Credința in February 1934, "Plăeșu" explained that he did not mean to defend either fascism, "Hitlerism", or "ridiculous" Marxism, since they trampled on religious freedoms; Eliade idealized direct action in support of "civic pride", "social justice" and "the courage to defend liberty".

Early in 1934, after the Guard managed to assassinate Premier Ion G. Duca, the authorities shut down Cuvântul and prosecuted its editor, whereas Credința continued to appear. However, in February 1935, Sandu Tudor was making his peace with Nae Ionescu, describing his teaching as the "nourishing bread", and Ionescu himself as an "awakener of consciences", "one of the greatest journalists alive."

Criterion scandal Soon after that episode, Tudor and Eliade found themselves in opposite camps. It happened once Eliade's literary and art club, Criterion, opened its doors to several of Tudor's ideological enemies. Credința seized on an opportunity for scandal, accusing several Criterion people (Comarnescu, Vulcănescu, Alexandru Christian Tell, and dancer Gabriel Negri) of promoting "pederasty". Researcher Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Tudor's allegations as a diversion: "The scandal had erupted for political and cultural reasons, and reflected a series of backstage arrangements that had exploded in dishonorable manner." According to historian Lucian Boia, the decisive factor was Stancu, already infamous as a blackmailer; the main victim was Comarnescu, who suffered a nervous breakdown. Art historian Barbu Brezianu, who witnessed the incidents as a Criterion admirer, calls the Credința articles "horrible calumnies aimed at Comarnescu."

The campaign was aggravated when Vulcănescu showed up at the Credința offices and pummeled Stancu, and degenerated further when Tudor himself participated in a brawl at Corso Coffeehouse. Brezianu recalls that Vulcănescu "grabbed Sandu Tudor by the collar", then slapped him. With Comarnescu and Negri in mind, Tudor himself wrote: "Only now do we get to see all the pestilent buggery in their unfulfilled, masturbating, inverted souls. I shout for all to hear, I address this thirty-year-some non-generation: avast! thou tricksters, though barren and vicious ones, thou that are rotten to the core, mediocre and neurotic". According to Ornea: "The strange fact is that Sandu Tudor, a religious poet and trained theologian [...], could stoop down to the level of such inurbane attacks". He was also upset that, while he stood by his friends and refused to even shake Tudor's hand, Comarnescu made "peace overtures to Credința".

In his entry for November 27, 1935, Sebastian concludes: "I am waiting for the day when [Criterion members] make their peace with Sandu Tudor [...] and discover that the Jews are alone responsible for the quarrel—especially myself, who has aroused discord among the Christian fraternity. It sounds like a joke, but it's plausible enough." Almost a year later, when Credința focused its attack on Sebastian, the latter noted: "The only thing that surprises me is that the attack came so late." Tudor and Stancu were defeated in court, and were obliged to formally recant. Ornea, who writes that Credința only published the verdict with much reluctance and discretion ("somewhere deep in the pages of one issue"), concludes that the scandal was a decisive blow for Criterion, causing Eliade's club to dissolve itself.

However, while some former members of Criterion were attracted into the Iron Guard, the Credința writers were still critical of totalitarianism. Before a fascist government was formed by the minor National Christian Party, Credința hosted contributions from Alexandru Mironescu, the physicist and center-nationalist author. These documented the encroachment of liberal democracy in Europe, defended political freedoms, and honored Romanian peacemaker Nicolae Titulescu. Although situated to the left, Credința and Floarea de Foc were largely anti-communistic, and Tudor's own news digests took a highly critical view of the Soviet Union. In one such piece, he expressed alarm about the outcome of the Moscow Trials.

Kulygin and the Burning Bush As noted by Neagu Rădulescu, Credința came to an abrupt "sad end", which Tudor took shame in recounting. An focused on his new passion, aviation, and bragged about having survived a plane crash. He maintained his religious focus during World War II. The Ion Antonescu dictatorship joined in Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. Romania's war on the Eastern Front gave an impetus to Romanian monastic life, by restoring the Romanian church's direct contacts with Russian Orthodoxy. The country witnessed the arrival of Russian monks, including one trained at the prestigious Optina Monastery. He was Ivan Kulygin (known to Romanians as Ivan Kulîghin, Ivan Kulâghin, or Ivan Străinul, lit. "Ivan the Foreigner"), a victim of the Soviet regime, who took refuge to Romania after the Battle of Stalingrad.

At around that time, Tudor and his friends organized a pilgrimage to Cernăuți, in newly reattached Bukovina. There, he began writing about the possibility of more regular "spiritual retreats", and adopted the Transfiguration of Jesus as his spiritual symbol. Kulygin instructed them about performing the "prayer of the heart", and Tudor, an avid student, was soon able to proselytize. His target audience included many of those who had joined him on the 1943 retreat, leading some of his biographers to suggest that Kulygin addressed a fully formed community of believers.

In August 1944, King Michael's Coup ended Romania's alliance with Germany, and inaugurated a brief period of political liberalism, with communism looming on the horizon. Tudor and other Kulygin-inspired Romanians joined in the "Burning Pyre" (Rugul Aprins), a prayer group which sought to register as a citizens' association. The authorities rejected their first application, in 1944, but Tudor persisted: the Burning Bush received its legal recognition in 1945 or 1946. Together with historian Virgil Cândea came a cell of social scientists and classical scholars, among them Alexandru Duțu. They were joined by high-profile Orthodox clergymen: Ghiuș, Dumitru Stăniloae, Sofian Boghiu and Arsenie Papacioc.

The Rugul Aprins title was perhaps inherited from Floarea de Foc, Scrima understood the meetings as "an Eucharist of God, brought to us by the angels", noting that the sessions were free, regulated only by "trust". Sandu Tudor would also explain that the incessant prayer is the very "heavenly prayer" of (sinless) Adam, revived by Virgin Mary "when she was taken to the Holy of Holies, where she lived in uninterrupted prayer [...] for 14 years".

Patristic scholar Ioan I. Ică Jr. sees Tudor's neo-hesychasm as a throwback to Paisius, with echoes from Gregory Palamas. Drăgan also notes that, among the affiliates, Avramescu, Dumitriu, and possibly Scrima, were esotericists of the "Guénonian" variety. In his interpretation, the Burning Pyre blended a Guénonian traditionalism into Kulygin's teachings and "Desert Fathers" monasticism, to the point of resembling a "new religious movement". A particularity of Tudor's movement was its critique of materialism. Opposed to Marxist doctrines and to the atheists, Tudor preached classical Creationism.

Soviet occupation troops arrested Kulygin in March 1946, and deported him back to Russia in early 1947. The missionary managed to send Tudor a series of farewell letters, appointing him his successor in Romania, the beneficiary of his will, and the representative of Optina rules. In his other briefs, Kulygin protests against being branded a "counter-revolutionary" under Soviet law, writing that his captors "understand nothing of things spiritual in nature", warning his disciples that they should hide all written records of their conversations. Records about what eventually happened to Kulygin are few and disputed. According to an unverified account, he died in the prison of Odessa, while others propose that he was transported to the Gulag. Tudor abandoned his public career and became a monk at Antim, with the monastic name Agathon. That monastery received his entire estate, including his massive book collection. His new project, to establish a monastery home for world-weary intellectuals, was supported by the local bishops. Fathers Ghiuș, Boghiu and Papacioc were moved far away from Bucharest, forced to reside at Neamț Monastery.

According to his visitors at Rarău, Daniil was living an exemplary austere life, but was prioritizing the internal prayer over all exterior ritual, and would spend half a working day submerged in meditation. The Securitate branded Tudor and Voiculescu as authors of "mystical, enemy-like" poetry, collecting testimonies about how Tudor's prayer group cultivated free speech. It is possible that the Burning Bush unwittingly antagonized the communists after its ideas were publicized outside the Eastern Bloc. In 1957, inspired by the self-exiled Scrima, theologian Olivier Clément wrote an essay about "Brother Agathon", which saw print in a Swiss Reformed newsletter.

However, according to Daniil's accuser Petre Pandrea, the Burning Bush group was not entirely adverse to collaborating with the communists. In his memoirs, Pandrea claims that Scrima and "the ex-sailor" Tudor were together responsible for slandering the anti-communist and religiously innovative nuns of Vladimirești, eventually rounded up by the Securitate with the tacit approval of Orthodox prelates.

Sandu Tudor was arrested in the home of his disciple Alexandru Mironescu, Subjected to interrogations, Tudor refused to nominate any of his student followers, and was apathetic during the interrogations of supposed witnesses. According to one of the co-defendants, the accusation was incoherent and misleading. It claimed that the prayer group intended to have government members burned at the stake, and that the 4th-century theologians honored at Antim were anti-communists. Tudor cared little about the past activities of his Burning Bush colleagues, but, even in 1947, he had denounced the Iron Guard as an anti-Christian enterprise.

As records of the prosecution show, the authorities were on the verge of admitting that the hieromonk had no criminal connections, and decided instead to focus on his activities as a 1930s anti-communist. They recovered Tudor's Credința columns, which, they claimed, read as "intense anti-communist propaganda, slandering and defiling the Soviet Union and eulogizing the capitalist order."

At the height of the anti-religious campaigns, in 1959, the Rarău skete was one of the establishments that were temporarily shut down by the Securitate.

At Aiud, Tudor became a victim of repeated torture, and, according to various commentators, suffered a martyr's death.

Officially, Daniil died at 1 AM on November 17, 1962 (1960 in some sources), at the Aiud Prison hospital, having suffered a stroke that left him comatose—afflictions which, in themselves, seem to suggest that he had been severely beaten in confinement. Using his contacts abroad, Father Scrima typed and salvaged some of Tudor and Voiculescu's last known texts, including an akathist to the Theotokos. He took them to India, where he began a second career in Sanskritology, In 1999, a neo-Orthodoxist publishing house (Editura Anastasia) issued Sandu Tudor's autobiography and other selected works: Ieromonahul Daniil Sandu Tudor.

Tudor's other activities, particularly his polemical stances of the 1930s, created enduring controversies, beyond Pandrea's allegations. Published shortly after the Duca assassination, Eliade's novel Întoarcerea din rai ("Return from Paradise") constructed the character Eleazar by fusing together Comarnescu's "words" and Tudor's "ticks". Tudor's attacks on Criterion, and the homophobic vocabulary he introduced, have been cited as possible influences for România Mare, a modern-day far-right weekly directed by Corneliu Vadim Tudor. According to Barbu Brezianu, Vadim Tudor resembles the Sandu Tudor of 1934, and, like him, is an "aggressive extremist."

After Pandrea, critics have continued to scrutinize some aspects of Tudor's monastic life. Bartolomeu Anania first publicized his claim about Father Daniil's alleged support of communist "reeducation" in his Memoirs (Polirom, 2008). Historian Cristian Vasile nuances this verdict, suggesting that Anania was "embittered" by his political background: Sandu Tudor was no Guardsman, not even a Guard sympathizer; in the 1930s he was rather the leftist, criticizing the far right. Therefore, he defined himself as anti-Guard even in his freedom years [...]; he probably thought, in 1935 like in 1962, that Guardsmen ought 'to be dusting off their conscience of the crimes they committed in the name of the Cross'.