Petre Tutea: Between Sacrifice and Suicide (review)

Petre Tutea (1902–91), a Romanian intellectual and Orthodox Christian, was imprisoned in Romania for most of his adult life. He spent thirteen years as a prisoner of conscience and twenty-eight years under house arrest. In a second phase of "reeducation"—the aim of which was to annihilate the personality and the national identity of those who had opposed communism (the first phase was physical torture)—Tutea was asked to collaborate with his torturers by teaching a course on Marxism to the other prisoners. Tutea replied that to understand Marxism, one would have to begin with antiquity, with Aristotle, and that such a preparation might take a few years: "So it was that he found himself as a political prisoner inside a Communist prison teaching pre-Socratic philosophy." In another subversion of communist reeducation, Tutea, placed in solitary confinement, used the pipes in his cell to tap out prayers and messages in Morse code to his fellow prisoners. However, submitting to the lessons of a divine reeducation—which Tutea counterpointed to the reeducation of the torturers—exacted severities: "In prison I enabled my comrades in suffering to see" that "only by faith could they be saved from the huge temptation of the political prison where at every step you have an opportunity to betray faith and principles for a bowl of food." Tutea called himself a "monk without a monastery." (He had been trained as a lawyer; he had worked as an economist; and, after his release from Aiud prison, when he was unemployed, he was known as the "street philosopher of Bucharest.") Tutea added: "My vocation has been that of legislator, not preacher, nevertheless I have spread faith as the wind scatters microbes." Tutea's epigrammatic style—and his ideal of redemptive suffering—have affinities with Simone Weil's writing, although Weil held fast to her outsider status, while for Tutea "the Real" was lodged within the institutional, in what Mircea Eliade called "the sacred space of the Church and the sacred time of the religious festivals which enable humans to escape the emptiness of the infinite."

Written by Alexandru Popescu, a psychiatrist—and Tutea's former pupil and scribe—this cross between a biography, an intellectual history, and an homage is vexed by its reiterative Christian ideology. Yet one must forgive Popescu much, including vestiges of dissertation detail and the expression of his own pieties, because he makes the monumental figure of Tutea (and Tutea's astonishing writing) available to a Western audience.