Nichifor Crainic – schiţă de portret
Nichifor Crainic – Portrait Sketch

Summary/Abstract: This paper sketches a portrait of the theologian, politician, poet and journalist Nichifor Crainic, leading fi gure of the interwar period, endowed with a vast culture and inspired by a vivid missionary conscience. Nichifor Crainic represents a model of Orthodox intellectual. His name is linked to Gândirea, a cultural magazine with a radical Orthodox direction that gathered around it an entire cultural elite of the time. He had a prestigious academic career, teaching some brilliant courses: a Course on Mystical Theology, a Course on German Mysticism, a Course on Dostoevsky and Russian Christianity. A general idea of culture emerges from the writings of Crainic (culminating with the Nostalgia for Paradise, without a doubt the most dense and best articulated of his books) as well as a real right-wing political doctrine, the “constructive nationalism” (a popular phrase at the time), concentrated in the Program of the Ethnocratic State (originally published in Sfarmă-Piatră, then included as an appendix in the volume of essays Orthodoxy and Ethnocracy), both imbuing Orthodoxy. About him, L. Blaga said: “The theological invasion in the post-war Romanian culture [after World War I – author’s note], I can see its massive and deep penetration would remain forever linked to Nichifor Crainic. [...] Orthodox theology became salt [sic! tr. n.] of Romanian culture today mainly due to its literary works. [...] What Crainic carried out for twenty-fi ve years for the rebirth of Orthodox spirit remains without a match in the annals of our cultural life. There was an emotional promoter’s activity [...], but there was the work of an orthodox thinker, too.” After 1947, the worst of his life began, the opposite time to the glory he had known in full. He died on August 20th, 1972. His legacy, pending for better times, remains as a theological, literary and publishing work of considerable interest.

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