Arsenie Boca (V): The Painting at Drăgănescu

The fifth article in the series on the hieromonk Arsenie Boca (1910–1989). The first two, The Life of Arsenie Boca (I): Up to Prislop (1910–1948) and The Life of Arsenie Boca (II): From Prislop to Sinaia (1948–1989), tell the story of his life. The third and the fourth, Arsenie Boca (III): The Teaching of Cărarea Împărăției and Arsenie Boca (IV): The Teaching of Cuvinte vii, examine his writings. This one examines the painting that he left in the church at Drăgănescu.

What can be seen on the walls we describe from photographs, most of them from the album about the church published in 2005. Our conclusion on each point is given in bold italics. What the defenders of Arsenie Boca say about the painting we have gathered at the end, in the conclusions. Every quotation and every fact has a reference to its source.

Between 1968 and 1983, Arsenie Boca painted the church of “Saint Nicholas” in Drăgănescu, a village in Giurgiu County, near Bucharest. The parish priest of the church was the priest Savian Bunescu, the brother-in-law of Mother Zamfira Constantinescu. Mother Zamfira had been a disciple of Arsenie Boca and the abbess of Prislop Monastery, in the Land of Hațeg. Arsenie Boca painted in tempera, to a design of his own, and lived at Drăgănescu from spring to autumn for as long as the work lasted.¹

Arsenie Boca came to Drăgănescu with the training of a church painter. In the spring of 1939 he stayed on Mount Athos. On his return home he asked the Metropolitan of Transylvania for help to continue “the study of the Byzantine painting of icons”. In the autumn of the same year he was received into the painting workshop of the Metropolis of Bessarabia, at Chișinău, and studied the old icons in the Museum of Religious Art in Bucharest.² In December 1954, so as to be able to paint the church at Prislop, he asked to do the six months’ practice after which the Patriarchate’s Church Painting Commission granted its authorization. From 1961 he worked at the painting workshop of the Romanian Patriarchate and came to be in charge of it. The historian Adrian Nicolae Petcu, author of the documentary biography published from the archives in the journal Tabor in 2023, says that he came to Drăgănescu as an “authorized church painter”.³

We have examined the painting chiefly from the album Biserica de la Drăgănescu (“The Church at Drăgănescu”), which appeared in 2005 under the editorship of Bishop Daniil Stoenescu and Mother Zamfira.⁴ Bishop Daniil came to know Arsenie Boca at Drăgănescu, in the years when he was painting the church.⁵ The album has photographs of the scenes, their description and two texts of Arsenie Boca about the painting. The first is called “Geneza picturii” (“The Genesis of the Painting”) and is signed by him. The second interprets the scene “Biserica și lumea” (“The Church and the World”) and was found, as the album says, among his manuscripts at Sinaia.⁶ We have also used two collections of photographs of the walls and the images of a television report from 2016.⁷ We have set what can be seen on the walls beside the order that the Church has given to the icon, and we have gathered the departures from it into nine points:

1. Christ is painted transparent and, in two scenes, beardless.
2. The crucified Christ tears His hand from the nail to call men.
3. Francis of Assisi and Wulfila are painted with halos, and Wulfila stands in the sanctuary (the altar), among the hierarchs who serve at the Holy Table.
4. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and St Peter’s in Rome are painted in the same nimbus, as a single Church.
5. Saint Nicholas Cabasilas is painted as a bishop, although he was not one.
6. The painter gave his own face to some saints, according to the testimony of those who knew him.
7. People from his world, from the family of the parish priest to Marx, are painted in the scenes of the church.
8. A character from a novel, Abba Zosima, is painted with a halo, as a model of the monastic life.
9. The world of the years in which he was painting, with telephones, antennas, a space shuttle and a city in flames, has entered the walls of the church.

What the Church asks of an icon

The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second held at Nicaea, confessed that the Church keeps unchanged the traditions she has received, written or unwritten. One of them is the making of icons “agreeable to the history of the preaching of the Gospel”. The Council says that this tradition is useful above all because through it “the incarnation of the Word of God is shown forth as real and not merely phantastic”. Following “the divinely inspired authority of our Holy Fathers and the traditions of the Catholic Church”, the Council decreed that icons of the Lord, of the Mother of God, of the angels, of all the saints and of all the venerable should be set up in the churches. It also shows that the honour given to the icon passes on to the one depicted on it.⁸

The Pidalion (the Rudder) is the collection of the canons of the Church, with their interpretations, translated into Romanian by Metropolitan Veniamin and printed at Neamț Monastery in 1844.⁹ It also contains canon 82 of the Sixth Council, which commands that Christ be depicted on icons “according to His humanity”, in place of the lamb by which some painters represented Him. The interpretation of the canon requires that Christ be painted “as a perfect man, in human form”, so that we may be reminded “of His sojourn in the flesh, and of His passion, and of His death”.¹⁰

In the note on the Seventh Council, the Pidalion shows what icons are made for. They teach “those who do not know letters, the prophecies of the prophets, the struggles of the venerable, the torments of the martyrs, and the sufferings and miracles of Christ”. They urge those who see them to call upon “the Saints as intercessors with God”. The icon is sanctified, according to the same note, “both by the character and by the name depicted”. Painters must know “first what the Scripture and the Gospel say, so that they may paint the Icons according to the understanding of Holy Scripture”. One who does not know must ask “those who know”, so as not to paint things “most unseemly and contrary to the Gospel”.¹¹ Such unseemly things, the Pidalion says, painters do “out of ignorance and out of bad habit”. The note ends with the command that icons “should have likeness to those whose images they are, as this holy council commands, and not be some unlike monstrosities”.¹²

The Romanian Orthodox Church has a commission for church painting, whose regulation the Holy Synod approved in 2012. The regulation says that church painting “is not the result of a personal creation, but represents the putting into practice of the centuries-old tradition of Byzantine painting, with a theological, liturgical and catechetical role”. For this reason, according to the regulation, church painting cannot be subject to copyright.¹³

1. Christ transparent and beardless

Arsenie Boca wrote a text about the painting at Drăgănescu called “Geneza picturii”, printed in the album Biserica de la Drăgănescu of 2005. There he writes about the image of Christ the Pantocrator, that is, the Almighty, as the painters of old used to paint it: “The Pantocrator was a severe Sovereign, even frowning, like an Emperor whom men should fear”. “The shortcoming”, he adds, “was that it lost the eternal youth from its face”. Then he writes: “The church image of the Pantocrator seeks, as Hegel demands in his Aesthetics, a universal image of man, of all men, of all nations”.¹⁴ Hegel was a German philosopher, who died in 1831.¹⁵

On the left wall of the nave, that is, of the central part of the church, Arsenie Boca painted the Resurrection of the Lord. Christ rises from the tomb white and transparent, with long hair, without beard and without moustache. Through His body and through His garment the colours of the wall can be seen.¹⁶ The album describes the scene in the same way: Christ “rises transfigured and transparent in a white nimbus and shroud”.¹⁷ In a white and transparent garment, too, Christ is painted in the sanctuary, above the Holy Table, in the scene with the holy hierarchs who are serving.¹⁸ On the right wall of the nave, near the entrance, in the scene “The Wedding of the King’s Son” (“Nunta Fiului de Împărat”), Christ sits on a throne, with the chalice before Him and with the halo bearing the cross, as in His other icons. Here too He is painted without a beard, with long, grey hair.¹⁹ On the vault of the nave, the same painter painted Christ the Pantocrator with a beard.²⁰

In “Geneza picturii”, Arsenie Boca does not say where he took the transparent body of the Resurrection from. Of the light of the painting he writes only that he left out black, which darkens the paints: “White lightens them, and gold spiritualizes them.”²¹

One answer was given by Ioan Buduca, an author who writes with esteem of anthroposophy, the teaching of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner. In 2014 Buduca wrote in the magazine Luceafărul that he had gone to Drăgănescu “expressly to see the iconographic representation of the Resurrection made by Arsenie Boca”. Of it he writes: “No one before Boca dared to make an icon of the Resurrection in which the body is invisible.” For such a body, he says, the painter had no model in Byzantine iconography. Buduca finds the model in the teaching of anthroposophy on the body of the Resurrection. According to him, the transparent veils of which the risen body is made are nine and stand in three groups of three, as in the anthroposophical teaching. He writes that the body of the Resurrection appears at Drăgănescu “in perfect correspondence with the non-visualizable description in the texts of Steinerian anthroposophy”. Buduca holds that the image could not have come from a book and concludes that the painter “saw the body of the Resurrection with his eyes. With the eyes of his soul, of course.” The article ends with the hope that the canonization of Arsenie Boca will be “an occasion for a fairer recognition of the non-heretical character of Steiner’s work and for the spiritual courage to restore reincarnationism to its rights”.²²

The monk Paulin Lecca, later an archimandrite, relates that Arsenie Boca gave him a book by Steiner, closed in two envelopes, to take to a priest at Govora, in Oltenia, a book “which spoke about clairvoyance, the aura, etc.”²³ In 1953 a letter of the Securitate, the political police of the communist regime, said of him that “after he entered the anthroposophical group he made rapid progress”. The historian Adrian Nicolae Petcu, who published it, regards it as a denunciation “which cannot be proved”.²⁴

The Gospel shows that the risen body of the Lord could be touched. After the Resurrection, the Lord said to the disciples: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones”.²⁵ And to Thomas He said: “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side”.²⁶ The risen body of the Lord is incorruptible, but it is the same body, with flesh and bones. Arsenie Boca himself painted, in one of the four small scenes beside the Resurrection, the appearance to Thomas. Above it is written “Thomas Sunday”, and Thomas, fallen on his knees, says: “My Lord and my God”.²⁷

The Seventh Council ordained icons following “the divinely inspired authority of our Holy Fathers and the traditions of the Catholic Church”, so as to show the incarnation “as real and not merely phantastic”. For the image of Christ, Arsenie Boca invokes the demand of a philosopher. The interpretation of canon 82 requires that Christ be painted “as a perfect man, in human form”, so that we may be reminded of His life in the flesh, of His Passion and of His death. At Drăgănescu, the body of the risen Lord is painted as a light through which the wall can be seen.

The Pidalion also gives an example of a wrong icon. Among the things “most unseemly and contrary to the Gospel” that some painters paint, it counts the icon in which the Lord is painted at Mid-Pentecost as “a young child, and beardless, teaching, since the Lord was then a full-grown Man after His Baptism”.²⁸ Mid-Pentecost is the feast at the middle of the fifty days between Pascha and Pentecost. Here the Pidalion condemns the icon that gives the Lord another appearance than the one He had at the time of the feast. The Resurrection was after the Baptism and after the Crucifixion, and the Christ of the Resurrection is the same “full-grown Man”.

Arsenie Boca writes that the old Pantocrator “lost the eternal youth from its face” and seeks for Christ “a universal image of man”, “as Hegel demands”. He painted the Christ of the Resurrection white and transparent, with a body through which the wall can be seen, although beside it he painted the appearance to Thomas, to whom the Lord gave His wounds to touch. For this body he had no model in the icons of the Church, and an author who esteems anthroposophy recognized in it the body of the Resurrection as anthroposophy teaches it. In the Resurrection and in “The Wedding of the King’s Son”, Christ is painted beardless, while on the vault of the nave the same painter painted Him with a beard. The Seventh Council ordained the icon according to the Holy Fathers and the tradition of the Church, to show the incarnation as real and not merely apparent. The Pidalion holds to be “contrary to the Gospel” the icon in which the Lord, who was “a full-grown Man”, is painted as “a young child, and beardless”.

2. Christ crucified, with His hand torn from the nail

In the scene “Biserica și lumea”, Arsenie Boca painted Christ crucified on a wooden cross, with His right hand detached from the nail. Beside it is written: “Come unto Me!” (“Veniți la Mine!”).²⁹ The album describes the scene thus: Christ “looks serenely, almost smiling, full of love, forgiveness and longing, having His right hand detached from the nail of the holy Cross, in a gesture and act of calling all men”.³⁰

In the text on “Biserica și lumea”, Arsenie Boca writes that the crucified Christ “detaches a hand from the nails and calls men with extreme force: ‘Come unto Me!’”. In the same place he shows what he understands by this: “Still ‘the Prince of this age’ has managed, to keep the Lord Christ yet in agony, on the cross, with one of his passions, the Church militant. But the stronger is the call of the Lord Christ to Christians: ‘Come unto Me’ the more painful is the tearing from the nails of a hand (of Providence for the whole interval until the end of the world) crucified.”³¹ The same idea he ascribes, in “Geneza picturii”, to Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician and religious philosopher: “Since then ‘Love’, the definition of God, is ever on the cross, in agony, until the end of history, as Pascal writes.”³²

The Gospel shows that the Lord remained on the cross until death: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”³³ After the Resurrection, Thomas asked to see “in his hands the print of the nails”.³⁴ The words “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” the Lord spoke in His preaching, according to the Gospel of Matthew.³⁵ The Apostle Paul writes: “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.”³⁶ The Epistle to the Hebrews says that we are sanctified “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”.³⁷

The Seventh Council requires that the icon be “agreeable to the history of the preaching of the Gospel”. The interpretation of canon 82 requires that Christ be painted so that we may be reminded “of His sojourn in the flesh, and of His passion, and of His death”.

In the scene “Biserica și lumea”, Arsenie Boca painted the crucified Christ tearing His hand from the nail and calling from the cross with words from His preaching. The album describes Him as “almost smiling”. The painter writes that “the Prince of this age” manages “to keep the Lord Christ yet in agony, on the cross”, and that the hand torn from the nails is “of Providence for the whole interval until the end of the world”. The Gospel shows that the Lord remained crucified until He gave up the ghost, and the Apostle says that Christ, raised from the dead, “dieth no more”. The Seventh Council requires icons agreeable to the history of the Gospel.

3. Francis of Assisi and Wulfila, with halos

In “Geneza picturii”, his text in the album Biserica de la Drăgănescu, Arsenie Boca writes that in the sanctuary he painted “a moment of the holy Liturgy: that of the changing of the holy gifts on the altar into the Body and Blood of the Saviour”. Of the hierarchs whom he placed around the Holy Table he writes: “The Liturgy represented provides for the hierarchs from the first, from Jerusalem, saint James, from the authors of Liturgies of the golden age, confessor hierarchs from the epoch of iconoclasm, of other nations, among whom also some from our land”.³⁸

The scene is painted on the left side of the apse, that is, of the rounded wall of the sanctuary. The album shows that the holy hierarchs stand around the Holy Table “in the supreme hour of the Eucharistic Change”, with the holy Apostle James, the brother of the Lord, in the middle. Among them, the album names Saint Spyridon, Saint Nicholas, Saint John the Merciful, Saint Athanasius the Great, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Polycarp, Saint Basil the Great and “Ulfilas, bishop of the Goths, standing”.³⁹ In the photographs in the album, Wulfila stands among the hierarchs around the Holy Table, in a bishop’s vestments, and has a halo, like all the others. In his halo is written “Ulfilas, Bishop of the Goths” (“Ulfilas, Episcopul Goților”), without “St” (“Sf.”), which is written in the halo of his neighbour, Saint John the Merciful.⁴⁰

Also on the rounded wall of the sanctuary, Arsenie Boca painted the First Ecumenical Council, beneath the inscription “From the 1st ecumenical council, the year 325, against Arius”. Arius stands before the emperor Constantine, and Saint Nicholas is preparing to slap him. Beside it, Saint Athanasius the Great, of Alexandria, flees in a boat on the Nile, pursued by soldiers. The inscription of the scene says “After the 5th exile of saint Athanasius the Great”, and the album adds that he suffered this exile “for his struggle against Arianism”.⁴¹ Also in “Geneza picturii”, Arsenie Boca writes of Arius that he was “combated and rejected by the Church at the First ecumenical Council” and adds: “He appears in the painting twice”.⁴² The second time he painted him in the scene “Biserica și lumea”, dragged by a devil in a net, with the words “Christ is a creature”.⁴³

On the right wall of the nave, in the Ascension of the Lord, Arsenie Boca painted the “cloud of witnesses” of the Epistle to the Hebrews, made up, according to the album, “of dozens of heads of saints, apostles, martyrs, hierarchs and venerable ones, who look from medallions towards the Lord”.⁴⁴ Among them, near the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, near Saint Macarius of Egypt and Saint John of Rila, a tonsured monk is painted, in a brown habit, with a hood. In his halo is written “Saint Francis of Assisi” (“Sfântul Francisc de Assisi”).⁴⁵

Francis of Assisi was a monk from Italy, the founder of the Franciscan orders. He died in 1226. The Catholic Church canonized him in 1228, through Pope Gregory IX.⁴⁶ Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol, counts him among those who fell “into the most grievous demonic delusion”.⁴⁷

Wulfila was the bishop of the Goths in the time of the emperor Valens and translated the Scriptures into their language for them.⁴⁸ Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus, a fifth-century historian of the Church, writes about him in the chapter “How the Goths became tainted by the Arian error”. There he shows that the Goths obeyed their bishop, Ulfilas, in all things, and that he was induced to bring them into communion with the emperor Valens. From that time, Theodoret writes, the Goths say that the Father is greater than the Son. They do not call the Son a creature, but they are in communion with those who call Him so.⁴⁹ The First Ecumenical Council, at Nicaea, confessed the Son, in the words of the Pidalion, “true God, of one essence with the Father, that is, having the same essence and nature exactly as the Father, and consequently the same glory”.⁵⁰

Arsenie Boca also left a text on the scene “Biserica și lumea”, found among his manuscripts and printed in the same album, Biserica de la Drăgănescu. There he writes what the halo shows: “Purity of heart is shown, through the halo, as the sign of holiness”. In the same place he adds: “We all have a halo, it is a sphere of radiations around the head and the whole body, of its moral quality, of the biography of our life even”.⁵¹ In the same scene, he painted the devil who tempts a man of science with a “halo” which the album describes as “colourless, faded or extinguished”.⁵²

The Pidalion shows that the icons of the saints urge the faithful to call upon the saints as intercessors with God. The 45th Apostolic Canon commands: “The bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, praying together with heretics, let him only be excommunicated”, that is, barred from Communion. Its interpretation adds that the cleric who celebrates the Liturgy together with heretics “is himself deposed together with him”, that is, is removed from the rank of the priesthood.⁵³ Canon 33 of the Council of Laodicea says: “It is not fitting to pray together with heretics, or with schismatics”.⁵⁴

Arsenie Boca painted Wulfila in the sanctuary, with a halo and in a bishop’s vestments, around the Holy Table, at the hour of the changing of the Gifts, together with Saint Athanasius the Great. In the same sanctuary he painted Arius condemned at Nicaea and Saint Athanasius persecuted for his struggle against Arianism. Wulfila is the bishop through whom the Goths, according to Blessed Theodoret, became tainted by the error of Arius, and the canons depose the cleric who celebrates together with heretics. Francis of Assisi he painted with a halo and with the name of “Saint”, in the cloud of witnesses of the Ascension. The halo is, by his own word, “the sign of holiness”.

4. Hagia Sophia and St Peter’s in Rome, in the same nimbus

The scene “Biserica și lumea” is painted on the left wall of the nave, near the entrance.⁵⁵ Below, beneath the cross from which Christ has detached His right hand, Arsenie Boca painted in a golden nimbus, with rays, two white buildings with domes.⁵⁶ The album calls them “the Church of Christ clothed in white: the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, united in a golden nimbus”.⁵⁷ Above the nimbus the painter wrote, as a saying of Saint Cyprian of Carthage, who died in 258: “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus”, that is, “Outside the Church there is no salvation”. Beneath the cross he wrote the article of the Creed: “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church”.⁵⁸

In his text on this scene, in the album Biserica de la Drăgănescu, Arsenie Boca writes that, beside the earth reddened by the consequences of iniquities, “there is another luminous, radiant hemisphere, representing the apostolic Church, with its first two branches: eastern Hagia Sophia and western Saint Peter’s in Rome”. Then he adds: “These two historic Churches stand on the word of the Lord Christ spoken to Peter, when he through revelation confessed the divinity of the Saviour”.⁵⁹ His disciple, the priest Petru Vamvulescu, who sought him out at Drăgănescu in 1970, writes in the book Părintele Arsenie Boca. Mărturia mea (“Father Arsenie Boca: My Testimony”) that the painter linked Hagia Sophia to the cathedral of Saint Peter “by a future bridge”.⁶⁰

In 1054 the Church of the West separated from that of the East.⁶¹ Arsenie Boca writes, in the same text: “What the proud cardinal Humbert did, throwing his anathema on the altar of Hagia Sophia in 1054, broke the unity, stained the holiness of the Church with a sin of pride”. He also writes that, since then, “the unity of the Church is no longer achieved except at the 8th ecumenical council - if there is to be one”. And he asks: “So who has gone out of unity, out of holiness, out of apostolicity and catholicity?”⁶²

The Creed that Arsenie Boca wrote beneath the cross confesses a single Church. The Apostle Paul writes: “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism”.⁶³ Saint Cyprian, whom the painter recalls above the nimbus, writes in his book on the unity of the Church: “God is one, and Christ is one, and His Church is one, and the faith is one”.⁶⁴

In the scene “Biserica și lumea”, Arsenie Boca painted Hagia Sophia and the cathedral of Saint Peter in Rome in the same nimbus, as “the apostolic Church, with its first two branches”. It is an ecumenism, that is, a union of the separated Churches, painted as though it had already come about. His own text says that the unity was broken in 1054 and that it is not restored except at an Eighth Ecumenical Council, “if there is to be one”. The Church is one, with a single faith, and this bond cannot be made so long as Rome does not return to the faith of before the break. Even if she were to return, her return would not concern those whom Arsenie Boca painted with a halo: Francis, who died in 1226, almost two centuries after the break, and Wulfila, who brought the Goths into communion with the Arians.

5. Nicholas Cabasilas, painted as a bishop

In the upper register of the sanctuary, Arsenie Boca painted Christ the High Priest, surrounded, according to the album, “by twelve hierarchs”, in medallions.⁶⁵ One of them is Saint Nicholas Cabasilas, dressed like the other hierarchs and with the Gospel in his hand. In his halo is written “Saint Nicholas Cavasila, Archbishop of Salonic” (“Sfântul Nicolae Cavasila, Arhiepiscopul Salonicului”).⁶⁶ Also in the sanctuary, in the scene of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Cabasilas is painted once more, standing, with a book on which is written “The Life in Christ” (“Viața în Hristos”). In his halo is written “Nicholas Cabasilas, Bishop of Thessalonica” (“Nicolae Cabasila, Episcopul Tesalonicului”).⁶⁷

Saint Nicholas Cabasilas was a Byzantine theologian of the fourteenth century. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls him a “lay theologian and liturgist”.⁶⁸ The Orthodox Church in America commemorates him as “Venerable Nicholas Cabasilas”. It shows that he seems to have become a monk at the Manganon Monastery and that he may have been ordained a hieromonk. It also writes that Nicholas was the nephew of Neilos Cabasilas, the Archbishop of Thessalonica, a city which Romanians also call Salonic.⁶⁹

The Pidalion says that the icon is sanctified “both by the character and by the name depicted” and requires that icons should have likeness “to those whose images they are”.

Arsenie Boca painted Saint Nicholas Cabasilas twice as a bishop and wrote in his halo “Archbishop of Salonic” and “Bishop of Thessalonica”. Cabasilas was not a bishop, and the Orthodox Church in America commemorates him among the venerable. Archbishop of Thessalonica was his uncle, Neilos. The Pidalion requires that the icon resemble the one it depicts and shows that it is sanctified also through the name written on it.

6. The painter’s face, given to saints

On the ceiling of the narthex, that is, of the room at the entrance, Arsenie Boca painted Saint John the Baptist young, with wings, holding his own head on a platter.⁷⁰ Bishop Daniil writes in the album: “Personally I am convinced that the image and the face of saint John the Baptist hides and betrays the self-portrait of Father Arsenie Boca”.⁷¹

In the scene “Biserica și lumea”, at the entrance, Arsenie Boca painted a monk crucified on a cross. The monk has a halo, and on its rim is written the beatitude of the pure in heart, from the Gospel of Matthew. On the arm of the cross is written “Self-denial”, and above his head, “Obedience to God”. In his hands he holds two torches, “Humility” and “Love”. Beside him, the devil cries out to him: “You endure like a fool; Down, off the cross!”.⁷² In the text on “Biserica și lumea”, Arsenie Boca writes that through him he showed the way of contemplation: “the manner of contemplation is shown by a man crucified, without nails, therefore willingly”.⁷³ The album says that the theme of the crucified monk is “specific to Orthodox monastic iconography”. Of his cross it writes that it is “possibly a second self-portrait of our Father Arsenie”.⁷⁴ The priest Vamvulescu writes likewise: “The monk painted at the entrance, on the left wall of the church at Drăgănescu – crucified on the cross, at whom the adversaries cried: ‘You endure like a fool!’ –, is an image of Father Arsenie.”⁷⁵

Tatiana Niculescu, the author of the biography “Ei mă consideră făcător de minuni”. Viața lui Arsenie Boca (“‘They Consider Me a Miracle-Worker’: The Life of Arsenie Boca”), which appeared in 2018, sees the painter in other figures as well. She writes: “In the gallery of the self-portraits painted by Arsenie Boca, his face at different ages can be made out beneath the figures of great saints”. She names “Basil the Great, John the Baptist, Saint Elijah, Saint George, the Holy Martyr Nestor, Paisius of Neamț”, “as well as in the representation of Jesus himself in the scene of the Baptism in the Jordan”.⁷⁶

The Pidalion requires that icons “should have likeness to those whose images they are”. It also shows that the icon is sanctified through the name written on it as well. Beneath the name of Saint John the Baptist, whoever enters the church sees, according to the album, the face of the painter.

Bishop Daniil, who edited the album together with Mother Zamfira, writes that in Saint John the Baptist at the entrance is the self-portrait of Arsenie Boca, and in the crucified monk, perhaps, a second. The disciple Vamvulescu also sees in the monk “an image of Father Arsenie”, and Tatiana Niculescu sees him beneath the faces of several saints and beneath the face of Christ at the Baptism. If they are right, the painter gave his own face to saints and, while he was still living, put on himself the halo that he himself calls “the sign of holiness”. The Pidalion requires that the icon resemble the one it depicts.

7. People from his world, in the scenes of the church

In the sanctuary, above the saints of the scene of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Arsenie Boca wrote the words: “I am the image of Thine ineffable glory, though I bear the wounds of sins”. In the same band he sketched a row of faces of men and women of our own day.⁷⁷ The album speaks of “several dozen human faces, some haloed”.⁷⁸ The priest Vamvulescu writes that, also in the sanctuary, Arsenie Boca “also used the faces of the people with responsibility in society and in the Church of that time”.⁷⁹

On the left wall of the nave, near the Resurrection, beneath the image of the Holy Archangel Gabriel, Arsenie Boca painted a baptism of our own day. Above it, Christ and an angel are painted. Below, around the font in which a priest is baptizing an infant, stand people in town clothes: a priest in a cassock, several women, an old woman dressed in black and a young couple.⁸⁰ The album shows that the infant is being baptized by a priest from Bucharest, from a church that Arsenie Boca often visited. The album also writes that around the font “six members of the family of the newly baptized, from the family of the parish priest Savian Bunescu, can be identified”.⁸¹ Tatiana Niculescu calls the scene “a family photo”.⁸²

Beneath “The Wedding of the King’s Son”, Arsenie Boca painted the wedding at Cana of Galilee. The album writes that the bridegroom’s sponsor (the best man), who rises amazed at the miracle, is painted, by the painter’s own confession, “with the features of Father Gala Galaction”.⁸³ Gala Galaction was a writer, priest and professor of theology at Cernăuți and at Bucharest, and he died in 1961.⁸⁴

In the Resurrection on the left wall, among those who are leaving the tomb, the album describes two elders of the Sanhedrin, “the first - bearing the face of Marx”.⁸⁵ Karl Marx was a German political philosopher and revolutionary, who died in 1883.⁸⁶

The Seventh Council decreed that icons of the Lord, of the Mother of God, of the angels and of the saints should be set up in the churches. The Pidalion requires that the icon resemble the one it depicts and says that it is sanctified also through the name written on it.

In the sanctuary, Arsenie Boca painted, according to the word of his disciple, “the faces of the people with responsibility in society and in the Church of that time”. Beneath the image of the Holy Archangel Gabriel he painted the family of the parish priest at a baptism, in town clothes, like “a family photo”. To the best man at Cana he gave the face of the priest Gala Galaction, and to an elder of the Sanhedrin, the face of Marx. The Seventh Council decreed that icons of the Lord, of the Mother of God, of the angels and of the saints should be set up in the churches, and the Pidalion requires that each icon resemble the one it depicts.

8. A character from a novel, painted as a model of the monastic life

In the lower part of “The Wedding of the King’s Son”, Arsenie Boca painted the three ways that, according to the album, “prepare our wedding garment”: “marriage through the wedding at Cana of Galilee, monasticism through the death of Abba Zosima and martyrdom through the martyrdom of the forty saints in the lake of Sebaste”.⁸⁷ The album shows that Abba Zosima is taken “from the writings of Dostoyevsky”.⁸⁸ Zosima is the monk in The Brothers Karamazov, the last novel of the Russian writer Dostoyevsky.⁸⁹ In the photograph in the album, Zosima lies on a table, among monks, and above, an angel accompanies his soul, painted with a halo.⁹⁰ The album calls him “the venerable one”. Among the monks around him is also his young disciple, Alyosha, whom the album shows “with the features of the philosopher and theologian Solovyov, according to the same testimonies of Father Arsenie”.⁹¹

The Seventh Council decreed that icons of the Lord, of the Mother of God, of the angels, of all the saints and of all the venerable should be set up in the churches, and it shows that the honour given to the icon passes on to the one depicted on it. The Pidalion says that icons teach the faithful “the struggles of the venerable” and urge them to call upon the saints as intercessors.

For the way of monasticism, Arsenie Boca painted, beside the forty martyrs of Sebaste, the death of a character from a novel, with his soul borne by an angel and with a halo. The album calls him “the venerable one”, and to his disciple, Alyosha, the painter gave the face of the philosopher Solovyov. The Seventh Council decreed that icons of the saints and of the venerable should be set up in the churches, and it shows that the honour given to the icon passes on to the one depicted on it. Abba Zosima is a character from a novel.

9. The telephone, the shuttle and the city in flames

On the right wall of the nave, near the Ascension of the Lord, beneath the image of the Holy Archangel Michael, Arsenie Boca painted a man in shorts and sandals, with glasses, lounging in an armchair. He holds to his ear a blue receiver, from which no wire hangs. Beside him, on a small round table, stands a television, and on the television, a desk telephone. In the background can be seen two large parabolic antennas, a map of the world and a space shuttle taking off. An angel with a halo calls him: “Up! All is ready, come to the supper!”. The man answers: “I have married; I have rounded off my field; I have bought myself 5 million horsepower; I am looking for a dwelling on another planet; …so… I pray thee to forgive me; I cannot come: we no longer have this concern…”.⁹²

The scene is the parable of the great supper, set in the world in which the painter lived. In the Gospel, the master sends to say to those who were bidden: “Come; for all things are now ready”, and they make excuse. One has bought a piece of ground, another five yoke of oxen, and the third says: “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.”⁹³

The world of today has also entered the icon of the Resurrection on the left wall. In the upper corners, behind Christ, the round earth is painted, with the buildings of a city in flames and smoke.⁹⁴

The Seventh Council requires that the icon be “agreeable to the history of the preaching of the Gospel”. The Pidalion asks painters to paint “according to the understanding of Holy Scripture” and gives them an example. In the icon of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, “it is not fitting to paint […] a man beneath the Apostles, and to signify the world, but in his place it is fitting to paint the Prophet Joel, who says: ‘I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh’”.⁹⁵

Beneath the image of the Holy Archangel Michael, Arsenie Boca painted a man of his own time, in an armchair, with a telephone, a television, antennas and a space shuttle, who refuses the call to the supper. Behind the Resurrection he painted a modern city in flames. The Seventh Council requires icons agreeable to the history of the Gospel. The Pidalion does not allow even the image of the world placed beneath the apostles, in place of the prophet of Scripture.

Conclusions

Despite the many departures from the canons of the Church, the defenders of Arsenie Boca have the highest words for the painting at Drăgănescu. Bishop Daniil Stoenescu, the author of three books on Arsenie Boca, called it, in the title of the 2005 album, “the ‘Sistine Chapel’ of Romanian Orthodoxy”.⁹⁶ In the album he calls the painting “a unique and unequalled Orthodox painting” and writes: “Christ Himself is the One who paints and adorns His churches as places of worship, through the gift and through the grace with which the Holy Spirit works and moves His instruments - the humble painters and church painters”. He also writes that the painting “is in fact ‘Cărarea Împărăției’ unfolded in images”, after the title of the book (“Path to the Kingdom”) examined in the third article of the series.⁹⁷ The priest Vamvulescu writes that the painting here, “according to the Orthodox order, is more precious than the Sistine Chapel in Rome”.⁹⁸ The present parish priest of the church said, in the 2016 television report, that it is “a painting revealed by God”. He added: “Father Arsenie even confessed: ‘I paint what I see’ and that is why the painting has a rich theological, spiritual message and even has prophetic accents”.⁹⁹

His disciples ascribe it to a command from Above. Vamvulescu relates: “Once a hierarch from the Patriarchate came to Drăgănescu, who ordered Father Arsenie to erase the non-Orthodox images painted in the church. Father Arsenie gave him tools to erase whatever did not suit him, for, Father said: ‘I have painted nothing except by command from Above, for the catechizing of the people, who lie in darkness’.” He also writes that Arsenie Boca “did not paint by the square metre, after patterns, but with revelation from Above, not only with documentation, but above all with prayer and fasting and, at times, speaking with the saints whom he was painting”.¹⁰⁰ A pilgrim from Făgăraș relates, in the collection Părintele Arsenie Boca: minuni și mărturii (“Father Arsenie Boca: Miracles and Testimonies”), compiled by Romeo Petrașciuc, that a priest is said to have asked Arsenie Boca why he painted otherwise than the canons of Byzantine painting require. Arsenie Boca is said to have answered him: “Well, Father, I paint them just as they are shown to me!”¹⁰¹ Saint Nicholas Cabasilas, however, he painted with the rank of archbishop that belonged to his uncle. According to Vamvulescu’s account, a hierarch of the Church judged some of the images non-Orthodox while the painter was still living. The Seventh Council, however, ordained the icon according to the teaching of the Fathers and the tradition of the Church, and the Pidalion sends the painter who does not know to “those who know”.

Other defenders admit that the painting goes outside the Church’s order. Sergiu Ciocârlan, a teacher of Romanian language and literature, defended the painting at Drăgănescu in the article “Lămuriri cu privire la pictura Cuviosului Arsenie de la Prislop” (“Clarifications Concerning the Painting of the Venerable Arsenie of Prislop”). He published it on Doxologia, the portal of the Metropolis of Moldavia and Bukovina, ten days after the Holy Synod had approved the canonization of Arsenie Boca. He writes that “the painting of the Venerable Arsenie does not respect the Byzantine hermeneia, that is, the Tradition of the Church concerning the manner of representing the Saviour Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and the Saints”.¹⁰² The reason, according to him, would be that Arsenie Boca, “because of the decadence of the style and the lack of masters with whom he would have wished to serve his apprenticeship”, “confined himself to a painting that does not claim to be canonical in the sense of the Byzantine Tradition”.¹⁰³ Ciocârlan bases his explanation on the letter of 1939, in which Arsenie Boca said that on Athos he had not been able to learn the painting of icons “for lack of masters”. After this letter, however, there followed the workshop at Chișinău, the old icons in the museum and the years of work at the Patriarchate’s painting workshop, of which he became the head. The theologian and poet Nichifor Crainic, whose courses in mystical theology Arsenie Boca had attended in Bucharest, visited him at Drăgănescu in the autumn of 1971. Bishop Daniil printed the letter that Crainic then sent him in the book Părintele Arsenie – “Omul îmbrăcat cu haină de in” și “Îngerul cu cădelnița de aur” (“Father Arsenie – ‘The Man Clothed in Linen’ and ‘The Angel with the Golden Censer’”). Crainic wrote to him: “It is a new style, it is a new painting, according to the new vision that you carry in your soul.”¹⁰⁴ Liviu Streza, then a professor of theology at Sibiu and later Metropolitan of Transylvania, said in 1992, in a testimony printed in the collection Noi mărturii despre Părintele Arsenie Boca (“New Testimonies about Father Arsenie Boca”): “Father’s painting was a visionary painting! He created something that goes outside the usual canon, outside the usual order”.¹⁰⁵ Of the Christ of the Resurrection, the priest Victor Bunea, who helped Arsenie Boca for one day at Drăgănescu, writes in the same collection that “the transparent body of the risen Jesus pictorially surpasses all the canons of the traditional hermeneias”.¹⁰⁶

Francis and Wulfila the defenders explain by his spiritual sight. Vamvulescu writes: “As a foreseer, Father allowed himself to paint in his works Saint Francis of Assisi too, of whom he knew that, although he was a Catholic, he had a holy life”. Those who blamed him for this he calls “the tone-deaf slanderers”, and he writes that “Father painted at the prompting from Above”.¹⁰⁷ The album calls Francis “a testimony of true ecumenism, in the Orthodox vision of Father Arsenie”.¹⁰⁸ Of the two cathedrals the album writes that, “enveloped by the hand of Father Arsenie in the same nimbus and aura”, “Orthodoxy and Catholicism […] will at length come again to the ‘hypostatic union’ of the first Christian millennium”. The album calls their union in the nimbus “ecumenical” and “visionary”.¹⁰⁹ The “hypostatic union” is the name that the Church gives to the union of the two natures, divine and human, in the one Person of Christ. Ciocârlan points out that the professors of theology Nichifor Crainic and Ioan Gh. Savin considered Francis a saint, and that Wulfila enjoyed the same “favourable reception”. He also brings forward a saying of Father Arsenie Papacioc, who, in a book of conversations from 1998, called Francis a “saint”. Also according to Ciocârlan, the passage is missing from the editions that have appeared since 2004.¹¹⁰ None of them says that the Church has numbered Francis and Wulfila among her saints.

The defenders also see prophecies in the painting. Liviu Streza said of the man in the armchair: “If we try to penetrate more deeply, there is something visionary there: an armchair that has in front of it an apparatus: a ‘videophone’ – you can speak with someone on the telephone and see the person in question.” He also wrote: “Father thought also of this possibility of transmission, of receiving the church into your home!”¹¹¹ The narrator of the 2016 report says that the painting “is, however, visionary”, because the man is looking for “a dwelling on another planet”.¹¹² A journalist from Adevărul writes that the man is painted “talking on the mobile phone”.¹¹³ The album ends the description of the scene with the sentence: “Prophetic words of Father Arsenie, of special topicality”.¹¹⁴

All these things belong to the time in which Arsenie Boca was painting. The videophone had been shown to the world in 1964, at a World’s Fair, and on 30 June 1970 the mayor of the city of Pittsburgh, in the United States, spoke “face-to-face” through a videophone, on the first commercial network for video calls.¹¹⁵ On 20 July 1969, a year after Arsenie Boca had begun the painting, an American astronaut of the Apollo 11 mission walked on the Moon.¹¹⁶ The first call from a mobile phone was made by Martin Cooper, on 3 April 1973.¹¹⁷ The American space shuttle was decided on in January 1972, the first shuttle was shown to the world in September 1976, and the shuttle first flew into space on 12 April 1981.¹¹⁸ We do not know in what year Arsenie Boca painted the scene. The wireless receiver, however, is explained by a saying of his. Vamvulescu remembers that Arsenie Boca told him: “I have a wireless telephone with God…”. Tatiana Niculescu links the receiver in the scene to this saying: the man “seems to hear this message on a wireless telephone – the wireless telephone with God”.¹¹⁹ About flights into space, she also relates, after a Securitate file, that Arsenie Boca held them to be made in order to find life on other planets, “and thereby to overthrow religion, which holds that there is life only on earth”.¹²⁰ The Pidalion condemns those who go about with icons at the feasts “telling as it were the things to come, and showing hidden things, and other lying predictions”.¹²¹

The scenes from the life of the Venerable Saint Stephen the New are also read as prophecy. Petcu writes that Arsenie Boca painted this saint, “with whom he identified himself”, and that he is said to have thus “prophesied” the day of his own death. Arsenie Boca died on 28 November 1989.¹²² The inscription on the wall, however, gives the day of the saint’s martyrdom: “on the 28th of the ides of November” (“în 28 ale idelor lui noemvrie”).¹²³ A pilgrim from Făgăraș relates that the priest who was then serving at the church told the pilgrims that Arsenie Boca had confided to him: “Know that I have shaken hands in the spirit with Saint John the Baptist”.¹²⁴

Some also see in the painting the twin towers of New York, which collapsed in the attacks of 11 September 2001.¹²⁵ According to the testimony of the same pilgrim, the priest who was then serving at the church told the pilgrims that the paintings are “prophetic paintings”. He also gave them an example: “on the left, as you enter the holy church, there are two skyscrapers struck full on, the earth burning somewhere behind, and two 1s with their heads turned on each block […]. That is, turning them round, it is the date 11”.¹²⁶ The website of a television channel wrote in 2018: “On one wall of the church the twin towers can be seen, in flames.”¹²⁷ The parish priest called the scene, in 2016, “an apocalyptic theme, indeed, a theme that makes us think, because we see that we have had such catastrophes in these times too that we are living in today”.¹²⁸ The newspaper Adevărul wrote in 2017 of “two buildings in flames, which resemble the two twin towers in New York”. In the same place, the representatives of the church said that linking the scene with the tragedy in New York “is only a speculative interpretation”.¹²⁹ In the images of the report and in the photographs in the album a city with many buildings can be seen, in flames and smoke, but no two particular towers can be seen, nor any numeral.¹³⁰ The towers rose in the years in which Arsenie Boca was painting. They began to go up in 1968, the north tower was finished in December 1970, and the south tower in July 1971.¹³¹

The album ends with the sentence: “Because the painting of the church at Drăgănescu has a perfect likeness to our Father Arsenie, we are fully justified in believing that it speaks to us and will speak to us from now on, for ever in the place of His Reverence”.¹³² The Pidalion requires that icons should have likeness “to those whose images they are”.

On the walls at Drăgănescu, the risen Christ is painted transparent and beardless, after an image that the painter seeks “as Hegel demands”, and the crucified Christ tears His hand from the nail. Wulfila stands with a halo around the Holy Table, together with Saint Athanasius the Great, and Francis of Assisi stands with a halo and with the name of “Saint” among the saints of the Ascension. Hagia Sophia and the cathedral of Saint Peter in Rome stand in the same nimbus, as two branches of the same Church. Saint Nicholas Cabasilas bears the rank of his uncle, and, according to those who knew him, the painter gave his own face to Saint John the Baptist and to the crucified monk. The family of the parish priest, Gala Galaction and Marx have entered the scenes of the church, and a character from a novel stands with a halo, as a model of the monastic life. The world of the years in which he painted, with its telephones, antennas and shuttle, has entered the painting as well. Some of the defenders of Arsenie Boca ascribe it to a command from Above, and others admit that it goes outside the canon. The “prophecies” that they see in it show things from the years in which it was painted. The album says that the painting has “a perfect likeness” to Arsenie Boca. The Seventh Council ordained the icon according to the tradition of the Fathers, to show forth the incarnation of the Word of God as real and not merely apparent.

Notes

1. The years 1968–1983 and the painting in tempera: Adrian Nicolae Petcu, “Părintele Arsenie Boca (o biografie documentară) II”, Tabor, XVII, no. 3, March 2023, p. 25, after ACNSAS, fond Informativ, dosar 2637, vol. 4, ff. 5, 9, 10 and 38. The dedication and the place, in Mihăilești commune, Giurgiu County: Bogdan Tănăsescu, the report on the archaeological research at the “Sf. Nicolae” church in Drăgănescu, 2007 campaign, in Cronica cercetărilor arheologice din România, electronic edition (cronica.cimec.ro, report no. 3881). The village, “on the bank of the Argeș, in the vicinity of Bucharest”: the testimony of the priest Petru Moga, from an interview, in Petcu 2023, II, pp. 25–26. The parish priest and the design: Tatiana Niculescu, “Ei mă consideră făcător de minuni”. Viața lui Arsenie Boca, Humanitas, Bucharest, 2018, p. 173; the parish priest, “Julieta’s brother-in-law”, that is, Mother Zamfira’s: Niculescu, p. 186. Mother Zamfira, “one of the disciples of Father Arsenie”: Adrian Nicolae Petcu, “Părintele Arsenie Boca (o biografie documentară) I”, Tabor, XVII, no. 2, February 2023, p. 22; abbess of Prislop: Petcu 2023, II, p. 6; Prislop, “in the Land of Hațeg”: Petcu 2023, I, p. 20. The living at Drăgănescu “from spring until autumn until 1983”: Niculescu, p. 195. ↩
2. Petcu 2023, I, pp. 8–9: the stay on Athos until 8 June 1939, after ACNSAS, fond Penal, dosar 13928, f. 20 (the autobiography of 1945); the letter of 14 June 1939 to the Metropolitan (“the study of the Byzantine painting of icons, which, he said, I could not learn on the Holy Mountain for lack of masters and because of the decline of the style”) and the reception into the painting workshop of the Metropolis of Bessarabia, “in October 1939”, until Christmas, with the study of the old icons “kept in the Museum of Religious Art in Bucharest”, after the Archive of the Metropolis of Transylvania, dosar III-728-1938, unnumbered f. Petcu is a historian, an adviser at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Petcu 2023, II, p. 5, the author’s note). ↩
3. Petcu 2023, II, p. 24: Arsenie Boca’s request of 14 December 1954, the Archive of the Archdiocese of Arad, dosar III-317-1949, f. 660 (“This, however, I cannot do without the authorization of the Painting Commission of the Holy Patriarchate, which cannot be obtained except after a practice of 6 months on some of the Commission’s worksites”), approved by Patriarch Justinian; pp. 24–25: the employment from 1 January 1961 at the Painting Workshop of the Patriarchate; “Although he had become the head of the Painting and Enamel Workshop of the Romanian Patriarchate, in June 1967 Father Arsenie withdraws from daily activity”; “since he had become an authorized church painter, he undertakes to paint in tempera the Church at Drăgănescu”. ↩
4. Father Arsenie Boca, Biserica de la Drăgănescu. «Capela Sixtină» a Ortodoxiei românești. „O smerită mărturisire ortodoxă de credință exprimată plastic” (“The Church at Drăgănescu: The ‘Sistine Chapel’ of Romanian Orthodoxy. ‘A Humble Orthodox Confession of Faith Expressed in Visual Form’”), edited by Bishop Daniil Stoenescu (the nun Zamfira Constantinescu), Charisma Advertising, Deva, 2005, ISBN 973-0-04122-9 (the title page and the flyleaf). We have worked on a scan of the album, without a text layer, and we give the printed pages. Hereafter we call it “Album”. ↩
5. Album, p. 5, “Precuvântare” (“Foreword”), signed on p. 6 by Bishop Daniil, on 31 August 2005: “the providential occasion of which we were made worthy by God, of having met, of seeing, of knowing and of hearing speak […] our Most Venerable Father Arsenie, at the time when he was working, labouring and toiling at the clothing with a unique and unequalled Orthodox painting […] of the church”. ↩
6. “Geneza picturii”: Album, pp. 15–19, signed at the end “Sinaia, Părintele Arsenie Boca” (“Sinaia, Father Arsenie Boca”) (p. 19). The text on “Biserica și lumea”: Album, pp. 177–180; on p. 176, the album gives it as an “unpublished text, recently discovered among the manuscripts of His Reverence, at the Monastic Settlement at Sinaia”. ↩
7. The photographs: two collections on SufletOrtodox.ro (63 photographs without dates; 59 photographs taken with a Nikon E950 camera, dated by the camera 17–19 November 2001), in the site’s archive, at “imagine/minciuno-parintele Arsenie Boca – pictura bisericii Draganescu”. We refer to them by the names of the files. We do not know their authors or their licence, and so we do not reproduce them. The report: “Picturile lui Arsenie Boca – Biserica Draganescu” (“The Paintings of Arsenie Boca – Drăgănescu Church”), Lumea Satului TV, published on YouTube on 27 April 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT2orvMxKF8). The quotations from the report are given after YouTube’s automatic subtitles, checked against a second transcription, made from the sound (31 October 2026). ↩
8. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Decree, in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II, vol. 14, p. 550 (the electronic edition on ccel.org): “we keep unchanged all the ecclesiastical traditions handed down to us, whether in writing or verbally, one of which is the making of pictorial representations, agreeable to the history of the preaching of the Gospel, a tradition useful in many respects, but especially in this, that so the incarnation of the Word of God is shown forth as real and not merely phantastic”; “following the royal pathway and the divinely inspired authority of our Holy Fathers and the traditions of the Catholic Church”; the icons “of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, of our spotless Lady, the Mother of God, of the honourable Angels, of all Saints and of all pious people”; “the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents”. The body of the article quotes this English text; “phantastic” means here an incarnation in appearance only, not in truth. ↩
9. Pidalion, Neamț Monastery, 1844, after the transliteration into Latin letters made by the monk Teodosie at Petru Vodă Monastery (the transliterator’s preface, 10 April 2006). We have also checked the text against another reproduction of the 1844 edition, an electronic edition. The translation by Metropolitan Veniamin: “Către cititori” (“To the Readers”), p. 9 (“The Most Holy Metropolitan Veniamin […] set about and translated this book”) and p. 11 (“the translation of the Most Holy Metropolitan Veniamin was made in haste”), with the signature of the protosyncellus Neofit Scriban, “In the Holy Monastery of Neamț. The year 1844, November, 10”, also on p. 11. The Pidalion is quoted in this article in our English translation from this Romanian edition. ↩
10. Pidalion, p. 225, at the canons of the Sixth Council: canon 82 (“we command that the image of the lamb, Christ our God, Who took away the sin of the world, be henceforth depicted on icons also according to His humanity, in place of the old lamb”) and its interpretation (“but that Christ be painted as a perfect man, in human form. So that through this we may be reminded of His sojourn in the flesh, and of His passion, and of His death, and of the salvation of the world which was wrought through it”). ↩
11. Pidalion, the note after the decision of the Seventh Council, p. 241 (in the electronic reproduction, pp. 264–265). ↩
12. Pidalion, ibid., p. 242. ↩
13. The Romanian Patriarchate, Regulamentul pentru organizarea și funcționarea Comisiei de Pictură Bisericească a Patriarhiei Române (“Regulation for the Organization and Functioning of the Church Painting Commission of the Romanian Patriarchate”), Bucharest, 2012, art. 135, p. 31: “Since church painting is not the result of a personal creation, but represents the putting into practice of the centuries-old tradition of Byzantine painting, with a theological, liturgical and catechetical role for the benefit of a community that has paid the costs of its making, and also as a consequence of the fact that through consecration it has acquired the quality of an inalienable, unseizable and imprescriptible sacred good, church painting cannot constitute the object of copyright”. The approval of the Holy Synod, “in its working session of 29 September 2012”: art. 137, p. 31. The Regulation replaced Patriarchal Decision no. 633/1958 (art. 137), which was in force while Arsenie Boca was painting at Drăgănescu; this we have not seen. ↩
14. Album, p. 16, in “Geneza picturii”. In the same place, Arsenie Boca writes that in the time of Romanticism “the image of the Lord Christ became the image of a handsome man, like men, without divine depth”, and about the universal image of man, that “Michelangelo achieved this universal image of man, in the image of Adam, at the creation”. ↩
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “German philosopher”, died in Berlin on 14 November 1831; among his courses in Berlin, “those on aesthetics”. ↩
16. The photographs “invierea1”, “invierea1(detaliu1)” (collection 1) and DSCN6443 (collection 2, 2001). The north wall: Niculescu, p. 180 (“The Resurrection of Jesus painted on the north wall of the church”). ↩
17. Album, p. 144: “THE RESURRECTION OF THE LORD, on the wall of the nave on the left side”; Christ “rises transfigured and transparent in a white nimbus and shroud”. ↩
18. The photograph DSCN6425 (collection 2) and the photographs “Epicleza” and “Epicleza(detaliu)” (collection 1); the photographs of the scene in the album, pp. 39–40. Album, p. 26: “The Saviour Jesus Christ in a white transparent garment”. ↩
19. The photographs “nunta1” and “nunta2” (collection 1) and the photograph in the album, p. 195, on which the inscription “Nunta Fiului de Împărat” (“The Wedding of the King’s Son”) can be read. The place of the scene: Album, p. 188 (“On the right wall of the nave, at the entrance to the holy church at Drăgănescu”). The halo with the cross is the same on the Pantocrator on the vault of the nave (Album, p. 90), on the Resurrection on the left wall (“invierea1”) and on the Baptism of the Lord (“medalion (botezul)”). ↩
20. Album, p. 86 (“In front of the holy Altar the vault of the nave is painted in light yellow with stars […]. In the centre is Jesus Christ Pantocrator”), and the photograph on p. 90; the photographs DSCN6402–6404 (collection 2). In “Geneza picturii”, Arsenie Boca writes: “The vaulted ceiling here has brought the Pantocrator near to the faithful, as near as could possibly be” (Album, p. 16). ↩
21. Album, p. 19, in “Geneza picturii”: “Black does not turn the paints into colour but darkens them, drags them down to the ground. White lightens them, and gold spiritualizes them, because it catches the natural light that sets everything aflame.” ↩
22. Ioan Buduca, “Arsenie Boca: reprezentarea iconografică a Învierii” (“Arsenie Boca: The Iconographic Representation of the Resurrection”), Luceafărul, no. 7/2014, electronic edition (revistaluceafarul.ro), without pages, read in the Internet Archive copy of 16 April 2016 (https://web.archive.org/web/20160416091055/http://revistaluceafarul.ro/index.html?id=4968&editie=191); the magazine’s website no longer works. On the model of the body: “for this invisible body Boca had no iconographic model, either in Byzantine iconography”; the nine “transparent veils”, “organized in distinct groups of three”, which he sets beside the three “physical bodies” (physical, etheric, astral), the three soul “bodies” and the three spiritual ones of the anthroposophical teaching. On reading, Buduca writes that Arsenie Boca, “not knowing German”, probably had no access to Steiner’s texts; he leaves open the hypothesis of a “fragmentary access” and holds that the “visualization” of the Resurrection “cannot come from there”. On anthroposophy: “it believes in reincarnation”. Our translation from the Romanian. ↩
23. Paulin Lecca, after Părinții îl dezvăluie pe Părintele Arsenie Boca, a compilation without author and without publication details, a PDF published in 2016 on the blog “Adevărul despre Părintele Arsenie Boca”, p. 46. Lecca does not give the year. Arsenie Boca was then at Bistrița Monastery, in Oltenia, where he was in the summer of 1945. See the first article of the series. ↩
24. The letter of the Securitate of the Cluj region to that of the Hunedoara region, of 6 June 1953, ACNSAS, fond informativ, dosar 2637, vol. 3, f. 319, after Adrian Nicolae Petcu, “Părintele Arsenie Boca în percepția poliției politice din România”, in CNSAS, Arhivele Securității, Nemira, Bucharest, 2004, read in the reprint on marturisitorii.ro of 29 September 2014, the text at notes 206–207. Petcu, note 207: “From having ‘connections’ to being a ‘participant in meetings’ was only a step for the Securitate, a denunciation which cannot be proved.” The letter does not show that Arsenie Boca was at the anthroposophists’ meeting of 31 May 1953, held in Cluj. See the second article of the series. ↩
25. Luke 24:39. The verses are quoted from the King James Version, in the standardized text of 1769, from the electronic edition on eBible.org (https://ebible.org/eng-kjv/), consulted on 31 October 2026, an electronic edition, without pages. ↩
26. John 20:27. ↩
27. The photograph “invierea1(detaliu7)” (collection 1) and the photograph in the album, p. 157; the inscriptions “Dumineca Tomii” (“Thomas Sunday”), “Pace vouă” (“Peace be unto you”) and “Domnul meu şi Dumnezeul meu” (“My Lord and my God”) are read on the photographs. Album, p. 146, places the scene among the four “appearances after the Resurrection” painted beside the tomb of the Lord and says that Thomas’s confession is “written on his own halo”. The parish priest describes the scene in the same way in the 2016 report, at 12:40–13:02. ↩
28. Pidalion, ibid., p. 241. ↩
29. The photographs “rastignirea3” (collection 1) and DSCN6449 (collection 2); the photograph of the whole scene in the album, p. 181. Arsenie Boca writes that the crucified Christ “detaches a hand from the nails and calls men with extreme force: ‘Come unto Me!’” (Album, p. 178). ↩
30. Album, p. 173. The photograph of the scene in the album: p. 181. ↩
31. Album, p. 178, in Arsenie Boca’s text on “Biserica și lumea”. The form “Providenții” (for “Providenței”, “of Providence”) is that of the printed text. ↩
32. Album, p. 17, in “Geneza picturii”. Pascal: Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Blaise Pascal”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose”, born in 1623 and died in 1662. ↩
33. John 19:30. ↩
34. John 20:25. ↩
35. Matthew 11:28. ↩
36. Romans 6:9. We have quoted only the first clause of the verse. ↩
37. Hebrews 10:10. ↩
38. Album, p. 17, in “Geneza picturii”. ↩
39. Album, p. 26: “On the left side of the apse of the holy Altar is represented ‘The Hierarchical Liturgy’”; “Around the holy Table, kneeling, bowing or standing and with heads bowed, in the supreme hour of the Eucharistic Change, stand the holy and sacred hierarchs and ministers of the heavenly and earthly assembly, having in the middle as protos the holy apostle James of Jerusalem”. The list ends with “two kneeling deacons, with their backs to the viewer, and three other saints without names”. On the same page, among the medallions of the sanctuary, James is called “the brother of the Lord”. ↩
40. Album, p. 39 (the whole scene, with the caption “Sfânta Liturghie mai ține lumea.”, “The holy Liturgy still holds up the world.”) and p. 43 (Saint John the Merciful and Wulfila, side by side). The inscriptions in the halos can be read on the photograph on p. 43. ↩
41. Album, pp. 27–28, at “The composition on the semicircular wall of the holy Altar”: “‘From the 1st ecumenical council, the year 325, against Arius’: The Emperor Constantine on the throne, Arius the heretic, laid bare in body and soul. Saint Spyridon behind him with the brick from which fire is kindled and water flows, and saint Nicholas preparing to slap the heretic who slapped the Son of God Jesus Christ, through his heresy”; “‘After the 5th exile of saint Athanasius the Great’, for his struggle against Arianism: on the river Nile […] floats a boat with two soldiers driven by the words: ‘We are looking for Athanasius’ and another boat with saint Athanasius”. “Of Alexandria”: the medallion in the sanctuary, Album, p. 26. ↩
42. Album, p. 18, in “Geneza picturii”. ↩
43. Album, p. 176: a devil “drags with his right hand, caught in the net of a sack, Arius the heresiarch: ‘Christ is a creature’”. ↩
44. Album, p. 163: “THE ASCENSION OF THE LORD and the Sitting at the right hand of the Father, on the right wall of the nave”; “The cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). ↩
45. The photograph in the album, p. 168: the medallions of the “cloud of witnesses”, each with the name written in the halo. Francis is painted with a tonsure and with a brown habit, with a hood. The list of the saints of the “cloud of witnesses” is also given in the text, on p. 163, where Francis stands between “saint Jerome” and “saint John of Rila”. ↩
46. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Saint Francis of Assisi”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “died October 3, 1226”; “canonized July 16, 1228”; “the founder of the Franciscan orders”. In the same article, in the section “Francis’s vision and the stigmata of the Crucified”: “Francis was canonized by his former protector, Pope Gregory IX”. Gregory IX, pope from 1227 to 1241: Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Gregory IX” (“reigned 1227–41”). ↩
47. At second hand: after Ciocârlan, “Lămuriri…”, note 7, who quotes St Ignatius Brianchaninov, Despre înșelare (“On Delusion”), the Romanian Skete of Lacu, 1999, p. 60. The saint’s title: Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol” (https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2026/04/30/101252-saint-ignatius-brianchaninov-bishop-of-the-caucasus-and-stavropo), consulted on 31 October 2026. ↩
48. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History IV, 33, NPNF II, vol. 2 (the electronic edition on ccel.org): Ulfilas “invented the Gothic letters” and translated “the Sacred Scriptures into their own language”. The time of Valens: Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History IV, 33 (see below). ↩
49. Blessed Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History IV, 33, NPNF II, vol. 3 (the electronic edition on ccel.org): the title of the chapter, “How the Goths became tainted by the Arian error”; “their Bishop Ulphilas was implicitly obeyed by them”; “Eudoxius succeeded in inducing him to persuade the barbarians to embrace communion with the emperor”; “The result is that up to this day the Goths assert that the Father is greater than the Son, but they refuse to describe the Son as a creature, although they are in communion with those who do so.” The body of the article follows this English text. The note of the English editor, which calls Ulfilas “semi-Arian”, is not Theodoret’s. Theodoret, born about 393 and died about 458 or 466, a historian of the Church: Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Theodoret of Cyrrhus”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026. ↩
50. Pidalion, p. 106, on the Creed of the First Council: “In which they proclaimed the Son and Word of God true God, of one essence with the Father, that is, having the same essence and nature exactly as the Father, and consequently the same glory, and dominion, and lordship, and everlastingness”. The text of the Creed, with the anathema against those who say of the Son that “there was once a time when He was not”, on p. 107. ↩
51. Album, p. 179, in Arsenie Boca’s text on “Biserica și lumea”, where he interprets the crucified monk, whose halo bears the beatitude of the pure in heart. The sentence that follows: “We become lit up or darkened and, through conscience, we become conscious of our state before God”. ↩
52. Album, p. 175: “On his colourless, faded or extinguished ‘halo’, irregularly framed by a serpent with open mouth from which tongues of fire come out, is written ‘Maia, the Father of lies’. He holds his right hand on the head of a man of science, breathing into him the false idea that: ‘There is no devil’”. ↩
53. Pidalion, p. 61, the 45th canon of the Holy Apostles, with its interpretation: “any cleric who shall even celebrate the Liturgy (concelebrate) with one who is deposed (as such are the heretics too, according to canons 2 and 4 of the 3rd council) is himself deposed together with him”. Excommunication is set beside exclusion from Communion in the interpretation of canon 44, on the same page: “excommunication, and non-communion”. ↩
54. Pidalion, p. 322, canon 33 of the Council of Laodicea, with its interpretation: “This canon ordains that we should not pray together either with heretics, that is, with those who err in the faith, or with schismatics”. ↩
55. Album, p. 173: “On the left side of the nave at the entrance […] is represented and presented the Church in relation to the world and the world in relation to the Church of Christ”. ↩
56. The photograph DSCN6449 (collection 2): the title “Biserica și lumea”, the crucified Christ, with the inscription “Veniți la Mine!” (“Come unto Me!”), and, in the lower right-hand corner, the white buildings in the golden nimbus. In the album: the whole scene on p. 181; the two buildings, side by side in the same nimbus, on p. 187. ↩
57. Album, p. 176: the weapons of the soldiers are turned “towards the Church of Christ clothed in white: the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, united in a golden nimbus, luminous and full of rays of the Holy Spirit, set beneath the foot of the Cross of the Lord”. ↩
58. Album, p. 176 (“Above the nimbus of the holy Church, Father Arsenie reminds us of the celebrated words of saint Cyprian of Carthage (†258) […]. Beneath the Cross of the Lord Christ, we confess the article of the Creed concerning the holy Church”), and the photograph on p. 187, on which both inscriptions can be read. Arsenie Boca mentions them in his text, on p. 178. ↩
59. Album, p. 177, in Arsenie Boca’s text on “Biserica și lumea”. In the same place he writes that the foundation of the Church is “the divinity of Jesus Christ”, “not the person of Peter”. ↩
60. Fr Petru Vamvulescu, Părintele Arsenie Boca. Mărturia mea, Arad, 2012, p. 56 (checked on the scan of the book). The seeking out at Drăgănescu, in 1970: p. 17 (“It was in the year 1970, when I sought him out at the Holy Church in Drăgănescu.”). ↩
61. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “East-West Schism”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: the event that brought about “the final separation between the Eastern Christian churches” and the Church of the West; “the final break came in 1054”. ↩
62. Album, p. 178, in Arsenie Boca’s text on “Biserica și lumea”. Between the two sentences quoted, Arsenie Boca writes about Luther’s Reformation and about the neo-Protestants. ↩
63. Ephesians 4:4–5. ↩
64. St Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church, 23, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, the electronic edition on tertullian.org (https://tertullian.org/fathers2/ANF-05/anf05-111.htm), consulted on 31 October 2026: “God is one, and Christ is one, and His Church is one, and the faith is one”. The body of the article quotes this English text. ↩
65. Album, p. 25: “In the upper register on the wall of the holy Altar, there are several medallions, which have at the centre the Saviour Jesus Christ the High Priest […] being surrounded by twelve hierarchs”. In the album’s list, on p. 26: “Saint Nicholas Cabasilas, archbishop of Salonic”. ↩
66. The photograph of the medallion in the album, p. 35; the inscription in the halo can be read on the photograph. ↩
67. The photograph in the album, p. 47; the inscription in the halo and the title of the book can be read on the photograph. Album, p. 26, places the scene, which it calls “Teologia icoanei” (“The Theology of the Icon”), on the right side of the apse of the sanctuary and calls him “st Nicholas Cabasilas, bishop of Thessalonica”. ↩
68. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “Nicholas Cabasilas”, electronic edition (https://www.britannica.com/print/article/87486), consulted on 31 October 2026: “a Greek Orthodox lay theologian and liturgist”, born about 1320 and died about 1390. ↩
69. Orthodox Church in America, “Venerable Nicholas Cabasilas”, commemorated on 20 June (https://oca.org/saints/lives/2018/06/20/103753-st-nicholas-cabasilas), consulted on 31 October 2026: “was the nephew of Neilos Cabasilas, who was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki”; “Saint Nicholas seems to have become a monk at Manganon”; “it is possible that he was ordained as a Hieromonk”. His book: “Concerning the Life in Christ”. The body of the article follows this English text. ↩
70. The photograph in the album, p. 99, with the inscription “Sfântul Ioan Botezătorul” (“Saint John the Baptist”). The place and the description: Album, p. 88 (“At the entrance to the holy church at Drăgănescu, on the ceiling of the narthex is represented saint John the Baptist and Forerunner of the Lord as a young man”; “In his left hand he holds Herodias’s platter with his own head”). ↩
71. Album, p. 88. The description of the painting in the album (pp. 25–193) is signed at the end by Bishop Daniil (p. 193). ↩
72. The photographs “calugar” and “iad3” (collection 1) and DSCN6449 (collection 2). The inscriptions are read on the photographs; the devil’s cry is written “Rabzi ca un prost; Jos, de pe cruce!” (“You endure like a fool; Down, off the cross!”). Of the inscription of the halo, on the photograph “calugar”, only the beginning, “Fericiți cei cu inim[a]” (“Blessed are those with [the] heart”), and the end, “vedea pe Dumnezeu” (“see God”), can be read clearly; it is the beatitude of Matthew 5:8, which the King James Version gives thus: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” ↩
73. Album, p. 178, in Arsenie Boca’s text on “Biserica și lumea”. He adds that “these qualities of the soul”, obedience and self-denial, make up the cross, while humility and love are “like two torches that light up our life”. ↩
74. Album, p. 174. ↩
75. Vamvulescu, p. 45 (checked on the scan of the book). Between the two sentences, Vamvulescu writes about Arsenie Boca’s exhortation to be “more Mary than Martha”. ↩
76. Niculescu, pp. 186–187, without a reference. It is the author’s opinion, after she had seen the painting. ↩
77. The photographs DSCN6410–6412, DSCN6416 and DSCN6428 (collection 2). On the band above the saints are written the words “Chipul slavei Tale celei negrăite” (“The image of Thine ineffable glory”) and “sînt, deşi port ranele păcatelor” (“I am, though I bear the wounds of sins”), and on the cloth in the middle of the scene, “Constantinopol: 19 februarie 843” (“Constantinople: 19 February 843”). The sketched faces have no names. ↩
78. Album, p. 27: “Above we have the words ‘I am the image of Thine ineffable glory, though I bear the wounds of sins’ (from the ‘Evlogitaria of the dead’) and several dozen human faces, some haloed and transfigured, which have attained likeness to God, others natural, disfigured and caricatured by sin”. ↩
79. Vamvulescu, pp. 55–56 (checked on the scan of the book): “In the Holy Altar he wrote: ‘I am the image of thine ineffable glory, though I bear the wounds of sins’. He also used the faces of the people with responsibility in society and in the Church of that time, saying, through Patriarch Iustin, ‘let us be reconciled to God’, as Saint Paul writes.” ↩
80. The photographs DSCN6407–6408 (collection 2). The place: Album, p. 146 (“To the left of the Resurrection of the Lord is painted the holy archangel Gabriel”). ↩
81. Album, p. 146. The album gives the name of the priest who is baptizing and of his church; we do not give them, nor the name of the child, written in the water of the font. ↩
82. Niculescu, p. 186, without a reference: “Another ‘family’ scene, more realistic and more explicit, has as its source of inspiration a baptism in the family of Savian Bunescu, the priest of the church and Julieta’s brother-in-law”; “It is a family photo from which Julieta is missing.” Julieta is Mother Zamfira (see the note at the beginning of the article). We do not give the names of those in the scene who may be living. ↩
83. Album, p. 190: the best man, “amazed at the ‘beginning of miracles’ (John 2:11) of Christ, painted by Father Arsenie, by his own confession, with the features of Father Gala Galaction”. The place of the scene, “in the lower part of the Wedding of the King’s Son”: Album, p. 190. ↩
84. “Gala Galaction Memorial Exhibition”, Ghidul muzeelor din România (the Guide to the Museums of Romania), cIMeC, electronic edition (https://ghidulmuzeelor.cimec.ro/idEN.asp?k=1658), consulted on 31 October 2026: “writer, priest and professor of theology at the universities of Cernăuţi and Bucharest”, “(1879 - 1961)”. ↩
85. Album, p. 146. ↩
86. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Karl Marx”, summary, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “German political philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary”, died in London in 1883. ↩
87. Album, p. 190. ↩
88. Album, p. 191: “the way of monasticism through the serene death of Abba Zosima, from the writings of Dostoyevsky, in the interpretation of Nichifor Crainic from the course devoted to the characters of the great Russian Orthodox writer”. On Crainic, see the conclusions. ↩
89. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “The Brothers Karamazov”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “the final novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published as Bratya Karamazovy in 1879–80”; “the monk Zosima”; “his sons Alyosha, Dmitry, and Ivan”. ↩
90. The photograph in the album, p. 199. Album, p. 191: “Beyond the head of the venerable one’s bed, an angel accompanies and guides the soul of Abba Zosima, in a white nimbus with a halo”; in the same place, “Around the venerable one stand five monk fathers”. ↩
91. Album, p. 191. ↩
92. The photograph DSCN6406 (collection 2). The inscriptions are read on the photograph. The place: Album, pp. 163–164 (“To the right of the Ascension into heaven is the Holy Archangel Michael”; “Beneath is the entrance to a modern building”). The angel’s call, without “Sus!” (“Up!”), in Niculescu, p. 185 (“All is ready. Come to supper”); in full, in the Lumea Satului TV report of 2016, at 15:36–15:45. Album, p. 164, gives it as “Sus totul este gata, veniți la nuntă...” (“Up all is ready, come to the wedding...”); on the photograph the word is “cină” (“supper”). ↩
93. Luke 14:16–20. ↩
94. Album, p. 144 (“Above, in the two corners, can be glimpsed the horizon-boundary between earth and heaven […] with flames, smoke and earthquake”), and the photographs of the corners, on p. 160; the Lumea Satului TV report, 2016, the frames at 13:40–13:47; the photograph “invierea1” (collection 1). The parish priest describes the place in the same report (13:34–13:50): “above, behind the resurrection, the round earth, on whose surface modern buildings are painted, skyscrapers”, depicted “in an explosive state”. ↩
95. Pidalion, p. 242. ↩
96. The title page of the album: “Părintele Arsenie Boca / Biserica de la Drăgănescu / «Capela Sixtină» a Ortodoxiei românești / (+Daniil)”. Bishop Daniil’s three books on Arsenie Boca: basilica.ro, “Mănăstirea Prislop: Întrunirea comisiei de canonizare a părintelui Arsenie Boca” (“Prislop Monastery: The Meeting of the Commission for the Canonization of Father Arsenie Boca”), 2 November 2016, electronic edition. ↩
97. Album, p. 5 (“a unique and unequalled Orthodox painting”) and p. 24, in the introductory word signed by Bishop Daniil on 6 September 2005. ↩
98. Vamvulescu, p. 17 (checked on the scan of the book). ↩
99. The Lumea Satului TV report, 2016, at 8:18–8:40. The automatic subtitles give “Pictești ceea ce văd” (“You paint what I see”); the transcription from the sound gives “Pictez ceea ce văd” (“I paint what I see”), the only form that fits “a și mărturisit” (“even confessed”). ↩
100. Vamvulescu, p. 36 (checked on the scan of the book). ↩
101. Romeo Petrașciuc, Părintele Arsenie Boca: minuni și mărturii, electronic edition “v.0.9”, without publication details, PDF p. 59. The testimony is that of a pilgrim from Făgăraș, which begins: “I remember another occurrence”; it does not say whether he was present. The book names the priest who asked the question, today a living hierarch. We do not give his name, because the occurrence is related by someone else and is not a public act of his. ↩
102. Ciocârlan, “Lămuriri…”. The presentation of the author in his book, Calea pocăinței lăuntrice în viața și scrierile Cuviosului Părinte Arsenie Boca (“The Way of Inner Repentance in the Life and Writings of the Venerable Father Arsenie Boca”), Doxologia, Iași, 2022 (the publisher’s official sample, PDF p. 2): “teacher of Romanian language and literature and CNSAS-accredited researcher”. The decision of the Holy Synod of 11–12 July 2024: the communiqué of the Press Office of the Romanian Patriarchate of 12 July 2024, reproduced on the website of the Archdiocese of Bucharest, electronic edition. Doxologia: “The portal doxologia.ro is a project of the Metropolis of Moldavia and Bukovina – the Archdiocese of Iași” (the page “Despre noi”, “About us”, consulted on 31 October 2026). ↩
103. Ciocârlan, “Lămuriri…”. ↩
104. Daniil Stoenescu, Părintele Arsenie – “Omul îmbrăcat cu haină de in” și “Îngerul cu cădelnița de aur”, 2nd ed., Charisma, Deva, 2009, pp. 78–79. Crainic died the following year, and the letter remained unfinished (Stoenescu, p. 78). Petcu 2023, II, p. 26, reproduces it after Stoenescu. Crainic’s courses in mystical theology, attended by Zian Boca in Bucharest: Petcu 2023, I, p. 8, after his autobiography of 1945, ACNSAS, fond Penal, dosar 13928, f. 19. ↩
105. Noi mărturii despre Părintele Arsenie Boca, edited by Ioan Cișmileanu, revised ed., Agaton, Făgăraș, 2005 (printing of 2012), the testimony “«Judecata de Apoi» şi «Calea Vieţii şi calea morţii» în pictura Părintelui Arsenie Boca” (“‘The Last Judgement’ and ‘The Way of Life and the Way of Death’ in the Painting of Father Arsenie Boca”), signed at the end “Pr. Prof. Liviu Streza, Sibiu, 1992 – acum Î.P.S. Laurenţiu Streza, Mitropolitul Ardealului” (“Fr Prof. Liviu Streza, Sibiu, 1992 – now His Eminence Laurențiu Streza, Metropolitan of Transylvania”). The printed page cannot be seen in the text that we have. ↩
106. Noi mărturii…, the testimony signed “Pr. Victor Bunea, Sibiu” (“Fr Victor Bunea, Sibiu”). The printed page cannot be seen in the text that we have. ↩
107. Vamvulescu, p. 56 (checked on the scan of the book). ↩
108. Album, p. 163, in the list of the saints of the “cloud of witnesses” of the Ascension. ↩
109. Album, p. 176: “Enveloped by the hand of Father Arsenie in the same nimbus and aura in a visionary ecumenical ‘perichoresis’, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, represented symbolically by the two emblematic cathedrals - Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and Saint Peter’s in Rome - will at length come again to the ‘hypostatic union’ of the first Christian millennium, according to the iconography of the church at Drăgănescu”. ↩
110. Ciocârlan, “Lămuriri…”, note 4: Arsenie Papacioc, Ne vorbește Părintele Arsenie Papacioc (“Father Arsenie Papacioc Speaks to Us”), vol. 3, Editura Mănăstirii Sihăstria, 1998, p. 93; according to Ciocârlan, “in the newer editions, from 2004 onwards, this passage no longer appears”. At second hand: we have not seen the 1998 edition. ↩
111. Noi mărturii…, the same testimony. The sentence about the call to the wedding: “in this respect the call to the wedding is taken as the model”. After the sentence about transmission, Streza concludes: “But the sacred is not transmitted through images.” ↩
112. The Lumea Satului TV report, 2016, at 16:08–16:33. ↩
113. Daniel Guță, “Explicaţiile celor mai bizare picturi din biserici: scenele explicite din Iad şi mesajele apocaliptice ale lui Arsenie Boca” (“Explanations of the Most Bizarre Paintings in Churches: The Explicit Scenes from Hell and the Apocalyptic Messages of Arsenie Boca”), Adevărul, 17 November 2017 (https://adevarul.ro/stiri-locale/hunedoara/explicatiile-celor-mai-bizare-picturi-din-1824339.html), electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026. ↩
114. Album, p. 164. ↩
115. Virginia Alvino Young, “Fifty Years Into ‘Picturephones’, CMU Revamps Original Machine With Modern Twist”, Carnegie Mellon University News, 26 June 2020 (https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2020/june/picturephones.html), consulted on 31 October 2026: “On June 30, 1970, then-Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty spoke ‘face-to-face’ with the former chairman of Alcoa, John Harper”; “it was the Mod II model that ushered in the first commercial network for video calls”; “The Mod I Picturephone appeared at the 1964 World's Fair”. ↩
116. NASA, “Apollo 11” (https://www.nasa.gov/history/apollo-11/), consulted on 31 October 2026: “20 July 1969—Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the moon”. ↩
117. “From ‘the Brick’ to the iPhone, the Cellphone Celebrates 50 Years”, Smithsonian Magazine, electronic edition (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/from-the-brick-to-the-iphone-the-cellphone-celebrates-50-years-180981910/), consulted on 31 October 2026: “It was April 3, 1973, and Cooper had just placed the world's first cellphone call.” ↩
118. John Uri, “45 Years Ago: Space Shuttle Enterprise Makes Its Public Debut”, NASA, 17 September 2021 (https://www.nasa.gov/history/45-years-ago-space-shuttle-enterprise-makes-its-public-debut), consulted on 31 October 2026: “The story of Enterprise officially began on Jan. 5, 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon directed NASA to build the partially reusable space transportation system”; “On Sept. 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first space shuttle, named Enterprise”. The first flight: NASA, “The flight of STS-1” (https://www.nasa.gov/history/sts1/pages/columbia.html), consulted on 31 October 2026: Columbia “took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 12 April 1981”. The painted shuttle, with the orbiter, the tank and the two side rockets: the photograph DSCN6406. ↩
119. Vamvulescu, p. 55 (checked on the scan of the book); Niculescu, p. 185. The biographer quotes the same saying, after Vamvulescu, on p. 175. ↩
120. At second hand: Niculescu, p. 184, after ACNSAS, fond Informativ, dosar I 002637, vol. I, f. 175: “Boca is of the opinion that space flights have the purpose of discovering life on other planets too ‘and thereby to overthrow religion, which holds that there is life only on earth, which was specially created by God for such a thing’”. We have not seen the document. ↩
121. Pidalion, ibid., p. 241. ↩
122. Petcu 2023, II, p. 25 (“he painted scenes from the life of St Stephen the New, the Venerable, with whom he identified himself and the date of whose passing into eternity he prophesied for himself”) and p. 19 (the death, “on the day that he had practically prophesied for himself”). ↩
123. The photograph DSCN6427 (collection 2). The inscription, about the martyrdom of the saint “at 53 years of his age”, is read on the photograph. ↩
124. Petrașciuc, PDF pp. 58–59. The words were said to the pilgrim by the priest “who now serves” at the church, as the pilgrim writes. We do not give the names of those in the testimony. ↩
125. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article “September 11 attacks”, electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026 (the date, “September 11, 2001”, and “The attacks against New York City and Washington, D.C.”); the collapse of the towers: National September 11 Memorial & Museum, “World Trade Center Facts and Figures” (see below), “the collapse of the Twin Towers”. ↩
126. Petrașciuc, PDF p. 59. The words are those of the priest who was then serving at the church, according to the pilgrim (see above). ↩
127. “ARSENIE BOCA. Dezlegarea PROFEŢIILOR de la Biserica Drăgănescu” (“ARSENIE BOCA. The Unravelling of the PROPHECIES at Drăgănescu Church”), RomaniaTV.net, 12 March 2018 (https://www.romaniatv.net/arsenie-boca-dezlegarea-profetiilor-de-la-biserica-draganescu_408534.html), electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026. ↩
128. The Lumea Satului TV report, 2016, at 13:34–14:47. ↩
129. Guță, Adevărul, 17 November 2017: “The representatives of the church explained that the association of the scene painted by Father Arsenie with that of the tragedy in New York […] is only a speculative interpretation.” The article does not give the names of those who spoke on behalf of the church. ↩
130. The Lumea Satului TV report, 2016, the frames at 13:40–13:47: the curve of the earth, with a row of small buildings in flames and smoke. Album, p. 160: the photographs of the two corners, with a city in flames and smoke and with white trails in the sky. ↩
131. National September 11 Memorial & Museum, “World Trade Center Facts and Figures” (https://911memorial.org/learn/resources/digital-exhibitions/world-trade-center-history/world-trade-center-facts-and-figures), electronic edition, consulted on 31 October 2026: “The Twin Towers began their vertical climb in 1968”; “The North Tower was completed first in December 1970, followed by the South Tower in July 1971.” ↩
132. Album, p. 193, in the last text of the album, signed by Bishop Daniil on 8 September 2005. ↩

In the same series

• The Life of Arsenie Boca (I): Up to Prislop (1910–1948)
• The Life of Arsenie Boca (II): From Prislop to Sinaia (1948–1989)
• Arsenie Boca (III): The Teaching of Cărarea Împărăției
• Arsenie Boca (IV): The Teaching of Cuvinte vii