Clasicism, creștinism, umanism în cultura epocii brâncovenești

Abstract

Starting with the XVIIth century, the existence of a humanistic movement with some distinctive features is obvious in Romanian culture. It is a stage of late humanism, a prolongation of European humanism, enrolled in a South East humanist current. Both humanist contexts are, more recently, an object of study for researchers. Among the characteristics of Romanian humanism, we can be mention: a) a lively consciousness of the classical antiquity values, based on the direct contact with the works of ancient literature and its renaissance interpretation; b) an awakening of the critical spirit that stimulates an incipient critic of the sources; c) greater intellectual curiosity related to a new sense of human values (the belief that, by developing spiritual and moral capacities, culture ennobles man, this last feature being associated with the idea of a special mission of the scholar who makes the humanist become a militant to lift his people out of their existing living conditions).
The central and particularly fruitful idea of the humanist movement was that of the Roman descendants of Romanians. It is precisely what Nicolae Iorga (followed by Mihail Berza, paraphrased above) tells us about the intellectual life of the Romanian Countries of the XVIIth-XVIIIth centuries, characterizing it as “a kind of late Renaissance to a late people in the development of its culture (...) This stream gives the Romanian people, by studying their distant and brilliant origins, by telling about the past of victory, a national pride”. Editor's note: The present material is also a tribute that the Archdiocese of the Lower Danube brings to the distinguished culture man (historian and philologist) Dr. Şerban Tanaşoca, present at the symposium held in Galaţi on 11-13 November 2016,
passed away on the date of April 7th, 2017.