Anti-Modern without being Non-Modern? Attitudes to Modernity in the Writings of Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Stăniloae in the Interwar Period

Abstract

This article examines attitudes towards modernity in the writings of the theologians Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Stăniloae, leading figures in the Romanian intellectual current of Orthodoxism. The question of modernity in Romanian public discourses is closely connected to the question of national identity. I am therefore focusing on the contributions by these two theologians to the discourse on national Romanian identity in the interwar period, when crucial contributions to this discourse originated. After an overview of the historical preconditions, I introduce the two theologians and their contributions to the discourses on modernity and national identity between the two World Wars. I conclude that the concepts of modernity of Crainic and Stăniloae had several dimensions and that their attitudes were ambiguous. In certain aspects, the theologians' concepts may be called ‘anti-modernist’, but their attitudes as well as their thinking cannot be characterised as ‘anti-modern’. I add a postscript on some renewed discussions of the ideas of Crainic and Stăniloae in Romanian Orthodox publications since the turn of the millennium.