Church, Society, Nation, State in the Internar Romanian Thinking

Abstract

“Any great philosophy ends up in platitude”. This was the warning issued by Constantin Noica to his disciples, gathered in the famous school of Păltinis. Moreover, we may add, this platitude becomes defining and it is, more often than not, the only thing people remember from the work of a thinker. As far as historic research and other fields of the humanities are concerned, the result is the same. One of the most convincing examples is the way in which the Orthodox Church is regarded and understood in the West. It has long been considered an exotic product or, at its best, an expression of the Russian anti-West spirit. The Byzantine roots of Orthodoxy added to these perceptions. The Byzantine world had long been regarded from the pathetic perspective of the Turkish – Phanariot Balkanism. As a consequence, the scarce works of the western historians on the issues of the Eastern Church hesitated between condescension and a deconstructive approach. The numerous Russian intellectuals exiled in the West due to the Civil War and to the atheist communist regime contributed to a great, but not sufficient, extent to changing these views.