Andrei Pleșu: Archive Pages - A testimony about Father Benedict Ghiuș

I was very young when I met Father Benedict. I should say too young, as I did not know how to rejoice and to appreciate the rich maturity of this meeting. The "Mediator" of the meeting was not an ordinary character. It happened that I was a classmate at the "Spiru Haret" High School with Floriana Avramescu, one of the daughters of Father Mihail Avramescu, a bearer, along with other brothers in faith, at the meetings of the "Rugul Aprins" (The Burning Bush), which ended with the arrest of all those involved. I was not a "catechized" high school student, and I owe Floriana my first "opening" to the universe of faith: she took me to the Antim Monastery, gave me readings (I remember Les âges de la vie spirituelle by Paul Evdokimov and some texts by Daniel-Rops) and introduced me to her spiritual father, Father Benedict Ghiuș. At that time, Father lived in a cell on the Hill of the Metropolitanate. We talked privately, and after the first meeting, I was given a reading suggestion: Claude Tresmontant, Comment se pose aujourd'hui le problème de l'existence de Dieu. I know now that it was not necessarily about a "soul" book of the Father, but about his spiritual subtlety: he quickly realized, sensing my spiritual "face" back then, on what path he could bring me into the territory of theological inquiry. In the same context, a little later, he made a disturbing confession to me. Still young, he had fallen seriously ill and had been hospitalized with a suspicion of cancer. He had gone through all the fears of dying and was internally dislocated by the fact that his monastic habits, his firm religious "commitment" (he was already a monk) could not calm him: he would wake up at night drenched in sweat, unable to make peace with himself and his destiny. And just then he saw, on the nightstand next to his bed, a volume of Plato. He opened it and read the dialogue about death, the famous Phaedo. Suddenly, he found a haven of peace. At no moment did the Father intend to suggest that Plato offers solutions that Christian spirituality does not have. What he wanted to communicate to the still groping young man in front of him was that "the Spirit blows where it wishes," that His "methods" are mysterious, that if the question is lived intensely and purely, the answer can come in unpredictable ways. He was actually asking me, regardless of where my momentary intellectual curiosity was directed, to remain available, open to the essential search for truth, ready to confront the unpredictable edifying nature of any meeting with the diversity of people and books.

The above confirms the portrait of a great believer, rigorous with the rules of his order, but at the same time, internally free from any barren convention, from any ready-made rhetoric, from any stubborn dogmatism. He did not speak much, he knew how to listen, and he had the "gift of tongues." That is, the ability to address each interlocutor "in their own language," according to their needs and intimate makeup, and not according to some bureaucratic "canon" from the lectern [...].

A detail remains in my mind, which seems to me more than significant: Father Benedict often began his sentences with "I believe that." He was never apodictic, self-sufficient, willing to promptly emit "guaranteed certainties." His thinking and affectivity were offered to the other wrapped in the softness of a solidarity of falling, not in the arrogant mantle of one who knows and teaches. But isn't that precisely the difference between "faith" and "knowledge"? Isn't faith a way of questioning, of hoping, of waiting for the fullness of a sensed and credited truth, while "knowledge" is the vanity of taking the lifeless mechanical world as "evidence"? On one side, the incredulous search, on the other, the unproductive possession. It is not, of course, about evacuating the purpose of scholarly research. It is only about not adopting its "reflexes" in a domain of another cut: the domain of tireless "searching" and not of hasty pacifying "knowing," the domain of the struggle with oneself and with the phantoms of the real and not of its geometric deciphering and utilitarian pragmatism.

In recent years, Father Benedict had immersed himself in an increased silence. When I told Father Andrei Scrima (his former "colleague" from the "Rugul Aprins") about this, he was very disturbed, in a way that I still do not know how to clearly situate. Father Scrima was rather loquacious. But perhaps his loquacity was a correlative version of Father Benedict's silence. Perhaps both were faces of the same inner unrest, of the same interrogative assault, of the same spiritual dedication, beyond any comfortable "installation," beyond any worldly "finality." Before he left us, Father Scrima expressed his desire to be buried next to Father Benedict, in the cemetery of the Cernica Monastery. In a mysterious way, his will was fulfilled. Now they both rest, one next to the other, in the awakening peace of the Word.

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