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various quotes from publications that mention Petre Ţuţea. Text in italics has been emphasized by the site editors
Emil Cioran, Aveux et anathèmes ("Anathemas and Admirations" Gallimard, Works, 1995)
P. Tz. - Un génie s'il en fut. Frénésie orale par horreur où impossibilité d'écrire. Disséminées dans les Balkans, milles et milles saillies perdues pour toujours. Comment donner une idée de sa verve et de sa folie? «Tu es un mélange de Don Quichotte et de Dieu», lui ai-je dit un jour. Sur le coup il en fût flatté mais le lendemain matin très tôt il vint me signifier: «Cette histoire de Don Quichotte ne me plaît pas.» * P.Tz. - A genius, if there ever was one. Oral frenzy out of fear or impossibility to write. Spread through the Balkans, thousands of spirited remarks lost forever. How can I give an idea of his verve and madness? "You are a mixture of God and Don Quixote", I told him one day. He was flattered, but next morning he visited me very early to clarify: "I don't really like that Don Quixote story".
Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul Fericirii ("The Journal of Beatitude", Dacia, 1998)
The words of St. Maximus the Confessor came true, that happiness, wealth, peace etc. don't necessarily benefit everyone... for example, Petre Ţuţea (for whom I endured such beatings. Onea1 would never accept that I never met him, that "I do not have the pleasure of his acquaintance".) Before his arrest, he asked his friends to sacrifice a cock to Aesculapius. When he got out of jail, instead of the socratic approach, a living faith.
(1Onea was a Securitate investigator during the infamous staged trials of the '50s. Many other prisoners witnessed that Steinhardt, a jewish intellectual who converted to Christian Orthodoxy in prison and later became a monk, was a favorite target of physical abuse - editors' note.)
Gabriel Liiceanu, Uşa interzisă ("The Forbidden Door", Journal, Humanitas, 2003)
June 19, 2001 Cărtărescu1 writes in his Journal, "3 A.M." "I read The Păltiniş Journal2 all at once, in one afternoon. It seemed like a grotesque tragedy or a tragic farce. But all madness somehow has its own greatness, and one can rightly believe, after all, that a loved one is still alive, because he is in you. This is Noica's belief regarding culture. With him it's the reverse of Paleologu's remark: 'he would have been a genius if he weren't so stupid.' Although Noica's admiration for Wittgenstein does erase quite a few sinful mistakes (without minimizing the one against the Spirit: no mercy). One should ask, what could possibly be the purpose of reading so many books if one doesn't understand Vulcănescu's gesture3? And how could his pupils swallow so many trite remarks, and why? But everything is much more complicated, because the grotesque image of old men like Ţuţea or Noica is the consequence of an interior tragedy within a larger historical one. Heidegger himself would have been, in these conditions, (...) a poor old granpa, with a funny beret pressed down on his eyebrows, exercising his maieutic in pubs (...)" (1Cărtărescu is a contemporary fiction writer, an opinion columnist and one of Humanitas' bestselling authors. Liiceanu is the Director of the Humanitas publishing house, a philosophy professor at the University in Bucharest and the Romanian translator of Heidegger's Being and Time. He was Constantin Noica's favorite disciple. It seems Cărtărescu managed to step on all of Liiceanu's toes with one jounal entry - editors' note.) (2a famous Journal, and a bestseller, kept and published by Liiceanu during the '80s to describe Constantin Noica's philosophical education in an informal setting. The Păltiniş Journal was a typical example of the so-called "resistance through culture" that Cărtărescu means to reject - editors' note.) (3Mihai Vulcănescu sacrificed himself in prison [Aiud, 1952] to save a fellow inmate by allowing him to sleep on his large body when it was very cold. He died of pneumonia soon after, asking his fellow inmates to promise they will never avenge his death and suffering. He is a respected intellectual, always mentioned along with Cioran, Eliade, Ţuţea and Noica. Vulcănescu was also very close to Nae Ionescu and wrote an short biography of his professor - editors' note.)
June 20th
The same dwelling in exteriority1 in his association of Noica with Ţuţea. Besides the fact that they were the same age, both from the same "interwar" generation (therefore, "older men", "granpas") - nothing else connects them. Ţuţea was quite a "character", a histrionic genius endowed with a prodigious ability for public speaking, but incapable of writing a coherent page. He left behind 322 Memorable Remarks2 and Cioran's sentimental admiration3. Noica left behind the latest European ontological system. Noica belongs to the history of human thinking, Ţuţea to cultural mythology. (1The expression sounds just as awkward in Romanian - editors' note.) (2Liiceanu gathered 322 remarks from Ţuţea's interviews and published them under this title. The book sold over 70,000 copies in Romania - a very large number, after 1989. Liiceanu never misses a chance to minimize Ţuţea's writings, and romanian commentators still speculate on this strange attitude. Some even pointed out that Heidegger's purposely obscure style Liiceanu seems to appreciate so much is worse than Ţuţea's difficult, but philosophically significant substantivations many journalists, literary critics and editors abhorred - editors' note.) 3Ţuţea had amicable relations with Noica, Vulcănescu, Eliade but among these remarkable "interwar" personalities only Cioran and Pandrea were his close friends. An extremely sincere man who always said what he thought, Ţuţea told interviewers he preferred Nae Ionescu's company, while in his generation only Cioran was of the same caliber - although he could never agree with Cioran's pessimistic nihilism - editors' note.)
Dan C. Mihăilescu1, The Radicalism of Nuances (Ziarul de Duminică, "The Sunday Paper", November 28, 2005)
Rumbling of paradoxes like Petre Pandrea and I.D. Sârbu, Petre Ţuţea ("his oeuvre seems to consist of a book he never really wrote, whereas the many pages he did write will never constitute an oeuvre", rightly observes Gabriel Liiceanu2) is, through these 322 Memorable Remarks, a tasty entrapment, as radically-risky it may be, all the more liberating and therapeutic. An iconoclast and iconodule at the same time, he mixes crude facts with dogmatic opacity, explosive relativisms with ironclad teologal rigor. Representing the school of free thinking, authenticity and boundless expression, Ţuţea - he, an ultradigressive by nature - is the man of laconic definition by definition, the overwhelming expression of an energy that is dizzying in its precision. (1 Dan C. Mihăilescu is one of the most popular and respected contemporary Romanian critics)
(2 Mihăilescu quotes from Liiceanu's Introduction to the second edition of 322 Memorable Remarks, the book he is actually reviewing in his article)
Aurel-Dragoş Munteanu, A Philosopher of Nuances ("Luceafărul", 1982) If a spectacular personality is any indication, and an ample, radical and daring philosophical approach may allow a preliminary evaluation of a great intellectual phaenomenon, then we must recognize the incredible presence of a thinker of the purest noble ilk, one of those we can describe once more with Hegel's reference to Socrates, of whom it is possible to know what he was, but never how he became such. This [thinker] is Petre Ţuţea, a dominating figure within the splendid generation of intellectuals who reached maturity at the end of the fourth decade, and managed to assert the glory of romanian intellect on all cultural meridians. (...) Above all, if we have to emphasize a qualité maîtresse1 Petre Ţuţea is a socratic thinker, but in a more profound sense than his alleged preference for speaking and having and audience, as opposed to writing his much-expected books. Petre Ţuţea wrote. He may be compared to Socrates through his great vocation for citizenship and pedagogy. A feeling of responsibility as I have never witnessed before, a spiritual aristocracy emerging from the absolute identification with the destiny of his country, in the name of an interior vocation to express himself with a purpose, to help others, and above all to educate them as good citizens - these are the personality traits of Petre Ţuţea, even as a writer. Ţuţea's amazing knowledge, unusual analytical power and ability of theoretical synthesis were always placed in the service of his message as the absolute citizen of an ideal republic. (1dominating characteristic - editors' note)
This article can be read in its entirety on the website dedicated to Aurel-Dragoş Munteanu's life and work: http://www.marileiubiri.org
Alexandru Popescu, Petre Ţuţea Between Sacrifice and Suicide (Introduction), Ashgate, 2004 In his torrential, incantatory style resembling that of liturgical prayer, mantras, or perpetual stage rehearsals, Ţuţea taught me - often with prophetic solemnity, sometimes with mischievous humour, even through gross exaggeration, which was intended to shake my unacknowledged prejudices - that the most important choice that has to be made in life is between spiritual self-sacrifice and moral suicide. In our long 'conversations' I seldom had a chance to ask questions about how this might apply in my own life. How do martyrdom and self-sacrifice apply in situations where circumstances do not force us into this clear way of t h e o s i s? How do they apply to the Christian believer in the affluent world today? Writing this book has helped me to formulate certain questions that I had neither the time nor the maturity to pose during my encounter with Ţuţea in the flesh. The answers have still to be worked out. Yet the encounter-relationship, conversation, love - continues beyond physical death.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
(T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding)
The answer is that to which each human being shall be called at the coming again of Christ, at that Day of the Kingdom for which the Lord instructs his disciples to pray.
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