On some aspects of political theology in the early articles of archpriest Dumitru Staniloae

Abstract

The article is devoted to understudied issues in the intellectual heritage of professor archpriest Dumitru Staniloae, an outstanding Romanian theologian of the twentieth century. More precisely, the article examines the journalistic articles that reflected his philosophical, cultural, social, political, and religious views, which as a whole can be organized into a model of “political ideology”. At the same time, the author considers the attitude to the issues of combining the Orthodox worldview, patriotism, and statehood in the context of developing the conceptual and ideological field of the idea of “Romanism”, which was established in the situation of territorial and social changes in Romania during the interwar period. In this regard, the religious “Romanian traditionalism” becomes the key triad of “Orthodoxy — collegiality — tradition”, which is equally dissociated from the materialistic-atheistic ideologies of both the democratic West with its individualism and capitalism, and the Bolshevik East with its authoritarianism and collectivism. The views of the Romanian theologian are presented on the material of some of his publications in the journal Gandirea and the newspaper Telegraful roman. Understanding the specifics of the ideological field of the Orthodox Romanian national and state self-identification, in the context of the formation of a new map of Europe in the 30s, can be taken into account when analyzing elements of the conceptual paradigm of Orthodox “political theology”.

Keywords:

interwar period, orthodoxy, church, nation, tradition, state, Romanian theology, political theology, archpriest Dumitru Staniloae