What Service Did Romania Bear in Orthodoxy, from Stephen the Great to King Michael?
The Gate, the Founding, and the Hearth

On 25 January 1475, two weeks after the victory of Vaslui, Stephen the Great, lord of Moldavia, sent to the Christian princes of Europe a letter in which he named his country with a word that history has never forgotten: “the gate of Christendom.” The Turk, wrote the lord, is coming against Moldavia with all his might; and if this gate is lost, all Christendom will stand in great peril. The Pope of Rome would call him, in his turn, an athlete of the Christian faith.

The gate. Not the throne of the world, nor the inheritance of Rome — the gate, the threshold to be defended. In an age when other Orthodox rulers were setting imperial crowns upon their heads and calling their capitals new Romes, the lord of the most brilliant Christian victory of the century called his country a threshold to be defended. The choice of the word “gate” is not diplomatic modesty. It is, as we shall see, a confession about service — and the key to this whole article.

In an article recently published on this site, on Saint Tsar Nicholas II, we followed an old and venerable line of interpretation of the Apostle Paul’s word about “he who restrains” (in Greek, the katechon; 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7): the churchly writer Tertullian bears witness to it while the empire was still pagan, and Saint John Chrysostom prefers it to other interpretations; in the nineteenth century, Saint Theophan the Recluse applied this reading to Christian monarchical rule, seeing in it the wall against which, until the appointed time, the mystery of lawlessness breaks, and in its fall the opening of the way to antichrist. It is a tradition of interpretation, not a dogma that identifies of itself every anointed king with “he who restrains.” On this ground we traced the way in which, in Russian political theology, Moscow came to understand itself as the continuator of the Christian empire — and how that empire was cut short in the cellar of the Ipatiev house, on the night of 17 July 1918, with all that followed.

But that article leaves open, for the Romanian reader, a question that can no longer be deferred: if the wall was there — what was here? What service did the Romanian Lands bear, who never had a tsar, within the body of Orthodoxy? Was this people only an onlooker at the edge of sacred history, or did it too bear, in its own way, an appointed task? And if it bore it, what became of it in the age of the kings — and above all on the day when the only anointed Orthodox king of Romania was forcibly removed from the country?

To all this we shall answer in turn. But first one thing must be understood, without which everything becomes tangled: why the wall cannot be divided.

One Single Empire: Why the Wall Is Not Divided

One thing, however, must be made clear first, lest the very thing we are defending be misread: the unity of the Church does not rest upon the existence of a single emperor. The Church is one through the apostolic faith, through the Eucharist, through the episcopate, and through communion in Christ — and it was one before Constantine, under hostile emperors, as it was later, under many Orthodox kings and under non-Christian rule. What follows does not touch this unity, but concerns a political vision: the way Constantinople represented the Christian oikoumene — that is, the whole Christian world together, as a single body. In the order that Byzantium inherited from Rome and baptized into Christ, the Christian world was imagined as a hierarchical family of rulers, with the Roman basileus at its center — basileus being the Greek word for emperor, and “Roman” the name the Byzantines kept for themselves to the very end. The imperial chancery called it precisely that, the family of kings. A single basileus sat at the head of the table, as the bearer of a function: the earthly image of good Christian order, the appointed protector of the faith. The other Christian rulers were not lesser emperors, but sons of the same family, each with his own rank. This was the normative claim of Constantinople — not a dogma equal to the unity of the Church, and not a reality accepted without resistance by all Orthodox states.

From this vision follows the way the question was posed when Constantinople fell: not “who takes a portion of the inheritance,” but “who bears onward the first place at the table.” And here the Orthodox history of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries knows a fact that the Romanian reader must have clearly in mind beforehand: the claim to this place was raised, before Moscow, in the Balkans themselves — and there it died.

The Serbs raised it first. In 1346, Stefan Dušan crowned himself at Skopje as tsar — emperor — “of the Serbs and the Greeks,” raising at the same time the Serbian archbishopric to the rank of patriarchate, so that his empire too might have, after the Byzantine image, its own patriarch. Constantinople answered with anathema — not only for the claim to the imperial title, but also for the unilateral raising of the Serbian Patriarchate, for the placing under it of certain dioceses of Constantinople, and for rule over Byzantine territories; ecclesiastical and political rivalry alike. Dušan’s empire did not outlive him: a year after his death it broke apart, at the Marica and then at Kosovo the Serbian army fell beneath the crescent, and the holy prince Lazar — of whom we have written at length — sealed the end by choosing, according to the tradition of the Kosovo testament, the heavenly kingdom instead of the earthly one. The Bulgarians too bore the claim: the Second Bulgarian Tsardom called its capital, Tarnovo, “the new Constantinople,” with its own tsars and its own patriarchate — until, in 1393, Tarnovo fell to the Turks, sixty years before the Constantinople it wished to inherit. And its scattered men of learning found shelter, many of them, precisely north of the Danube: one of the most notable, Gregory Tsamblak, would serve at Suceava, at the court of Moldavia, and there write the life and the service of Saint John the New — an early sign that, when imperial pretensions fall, their people find a place at the gate.

The Muscovite claim to the first place did not arise all at once in 1453, nor was it, in that hour, the only one remaining: the Empire of Trebizond still endured for a time (until 1461) and small Orthodox dominions with it, and in the Caucasus the Georgian kingdoms. It took shape gradually, as the other free Orthodox centers fell or fragmented, and received its classic formulation — “Moscow, the Third Rome” — only in the letters of the monk Philotheus, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and its full liturgical form only through the coronation of Ivan IV as tsar, in 1547. The wall, by the nature of this service, admits no two heads: it settles, in time, upon one alone. The rest of the Orthodox world was passing, one by one, under foreign rule — and would discover, beneath it, other services than that of the wall.

“Io, by the Grace of God Lord”: Why Our Princes Did Not Become Tsars

Where did the Romanian Lands stand in this picture? The answer begins with titulature — because the way a ruler names himself is his confession of political faith.

The lords of Moldavia and Wallachia never founded a tsardom and did not use “tsar” as a settled diplomatic title. Their charters open, century after century, with the same formula: “Io [N.], by the grace of God lord.” That “Io,” inherited from the chancery of the Asen dynasty, is bound to the name John — which means “God has shown mercy” — and the whole formula sets rule within a sacral and dynastic speech: a gift from above, not a conquest from below. “Lord” (domn), from the Latin dominus, denotes broad rule within the country; the lords held full authority within their borders, even while they bore, outwardly, ties of vassalage. What they never raised was the universal claim of the tsar. Not that imperial symbolism was wholly foreign to them — a few court sources and inscriptions call Stephen himself “tsar,” and in his princely image aspirations of Byzantine continuity have been discerned; but never did this become a title and a program. Between “the tsar of all Russia” and “the lord of the land of Moldavia” remains, with this nuance, the difference between the wall and the gate.

And not because they lacked grounds for pride. Our lords were kin to the imperial houses of Byzantium and the Balkans; their countries were, after 1453, alongside Russia, the only Orthodox lands not trodden underfoot, with rulers of the Eastern faith on their thrones; the wealth and the army of Stephen’s Moldavia astonished the Western chroniclers. An imperial claim could have been contrived — others contrived it with less. That it was never raised is not a lack but a discernment: the lords understood, or were kept to understand, that their service was another.

The anointing, on the other hand, they did have. At his enthronement, the lord was anointed by the metropolitan of the country, in the princely church, after the Eastern rite; the chronicles and the acts call him naturally “the anointed of God,” and the theology of this anointing would be written, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by a Romanian lord himself: Saint Neagoe Basarab, in the Teachings to his son Theodosius, where rule is depicted wholly as a service before God — with fear, with mercy, with just judgment, with death forever before the eyes. It is, in all the post-Byzantine East, the deepest book on how an anointed of God ought to rule — written not at the court of any tsar, but at Argeș.

So then: anointed, yes; tsars, no. A local anointing, full within its borders, without the claim of the wall. And if anyone asks what service an anointed one who is not the wall can bear, the answer was given by Stephen himself, in the letter from which we began.

To follow it clearly, one single image is needed, held in mind from one end of the article to the other. Let us picture Orthodoxy after the fall of Byzantium as a great house left without its master — the emperor at Constantinople. The house did not collapse; but its offices, which until then had rested upon the master, had to be borne by the household. There are three such offices, and we shall name them, in all that follows, with three words — three faces of one and the same service, not three unrelated things. The wall we know from the article on the Holy Tsar: the rule that holds the house together and defends it from the great, unseen peril — Russia bore it, until 1918. But a house needs three more things, and these are precisely what the Romanian Lands bore. The gate: the entrance through which the visible enemy bursts in, defended by the sword — Moldavia and Wallachia in the path of the Ottoman. The founding: the dowry and the sustenance of the house, the outlay that keeps the lamps lit and the roofs whole — the donations of the lords to the whole enslaved East. And the hearth: the fire in the midst, without which the house, however well defended and however rich, remains cold and dead — the unceasing prayer of the hermits. Wall, gate, founding, hearth: four offices of the same house, divided among the Orthodox peoples as time and God allowed. The last three this people bore in particular — and of them, from here on, is this article.

The Gate: The Sword That Defends Is Not the Wall That Restrains

Let us return to Vaslui. On 10 January 1475, at Podul Înalt, in fog and marsh, a Moldavian army greatly inferior in number crushed an overwhelming Ottoman force, sent expressly to settle accounts with the disobedient lord. It was one of the heaviest Ottoman defeats of the fifteenth century, and Christendom understood it as such: the pope wrote to the lord of Moldavia, and the lord wrote to the princes the letter of the gate. A year later, at Războieni, Stephen would himself be defeated; and the tradition preserved by Ion Neculce in “A Handful of Words” says that the lord knocked then, by night, at the door of the hermit Daniel of Voroneț, asking whether it was not time to surrender the country — and the elder commanded him not to surrender it, but to rise again to battle, for the victory would come; and it came, and the lord built Voroneț. For forty-seven years Stephen held the sword raised, and forty-four churches he built — one, says tradition again, for each victory.

And Stephen did not stand alone at the gate: he is only the most brilliant link of a chain stretching over two and a half centuries. Before him, Mircea the Elder had halted at Rovine, in the marshes of the Argeș, the army of Sultan Bayezid — the first great Romanian barrier in the path of the crescent — and he too was founding, at Cozia, in the very time he was fighting. Between them, John Hunyadi, the Romanian who became voivode of Transylvania, shattered in 1456, beneath the walls of Belgrade, the army of the conqueror of Constantinople — a victory to which the whole West would bind the ringing of the noon bells (ordered, in fact, by Pope Callixtus III even before the news of the triumph arrived) and which kept Belgrade Christian for another sixty-five years, until 1521. And after Stephen, Michael the Brave would raise the sword of the gate once more, at Călugăreni, in 1595 — a resounding victory, even if it did not by itself end the war. Everywhere the same pattern: lords who fight in the morning and found in the evening, with one eye on the ford and one on the altar.

Here, then, is the gate, in all its glory. And yet — and here theological discernment must work, not piety alone — the gate is not the wall of the Fathers’ interpretation, and to confuse the two is to spoil both services. The Ottoman sword was the outward enemy of the Cross; but the mystery of lawlessness, the one that “he who restrains” holds back, did not come visibly riding from across the Danube — it would erupt, in its own time, from within an apostate Christendom. The gate keeps out the visible invader; the wall restrains the unseen apostasy — and they are two distinct services, both from God. Not that they are two wholly separate worlds: lawlessness is not the monopoly of a single civilization, and the war from without and the sin from within often feed one another. Christian empires too have known apostasy, persecution, and injustice, just as non-Christian dominions have been able, in certain circumstances, to permit the life of the Church. The distinction remains illuminating nonetheless, as two distinct faces of the peril — and as two distinct services against it.

The proof of this distinction is a historical fact many overlook: under the rule of the Turk, the Church remained alive. Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror, himself installed Gennadius Scholarius as patriarch of Constantinople and allowed him to govern the empire’s Orthodox in matters of faith — though this order, which the nineteenth century called “the millet system,” did not take shape all at once but gradually, and its uniform image has often been projected backward by later historians. It was a heavy bondage, with legal inequality between the Christian and the ruler, with churches seized and turned into mosques, with children carried off through the devshirme for the janissaries, with pressures to apostatize and new martyrs in every century — nothing of it should be sweetened. And yet, unlike the state atheism that came later, Ottoman rule did not seek, steadily and as a program, the abolition of faith as such. The altars kept burning, the Liturgy was served, Athos remained Athos. The crescent enslaved bodies and oppressed souls, but it did not seek to extinguish from them the faith in God. That — the extinguishing of faith as a foundation of state — would come from elsewhere: from the heart of a Christian Europe gone out of its mind, through revolution and through state atheism. Against that was the wall of the East appointed; against the visible sword, the gates — and the most battered gate of all was, for a century and a half, Moldavia and Wallachia.

And that the two services did not ignore one another but sought one another, Providence bound the gate to the wall with the most human of all bonds: blood. Stephen’s daughter Elena was given in marriage to the son of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow; and her son Dmitry — the grandson of Stephen the Great — was solemnly crowned at Moscow, in the Cathedral of the Dormition, on 4 February 1498, as heir and grand prince associate in rule, with the barmy and the cap of Monomakh, in a ceremonial of Byzantine inspiration that prefigured the tsarist coronations to come — though it was not yet an imperial coronation proper, that threshold being reached only by Ivan IV, in 1547. The blood of the lord of Moldavia stood, then, for a moment in the very cradle of Moscow’s imperial ceremonial. That Elena and Dmitry afterward fell into disgrace and died in prison — she in 1505, he in 1509 — amid the struggles of the Muscovite court, is the shadow that honest history tells as well; the wall dealt harshly even with the blood of the gate. But the dynastic gesture remains a witness: the two services knew one another.

The Founding: The Material Lifeblood of Post-Byzantine Orthodoxy

The second service comes to light the moment we ask: after 1453, on what did Orthodoxy live? The founding — the dowry and sustenance of the house, in the image above — is precisely the answer to this question, and it is not a spiritual one but simply a human one: who paid for the oil of the lamps at the Holy Sepulchre, the grain of Athos, the roofs of Sinai, the printing of the service books, the schools of the impoverished patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, all under pagan rule and bereft of the emperor who had been, for a thousand years, their protector and treasurer?

One of the most important and most steadfast answers, for four centuries, came from the lords of Bucharest and Iași. Enslaved Orthodoxy was supported also by local communities, by Greek merchants, by Phanariot dignitaries, by Russia, by Georgia, and by other networks of patronage; but the Romanian support was, in certain ages, among the greatest and all but irreplaceable. Nicolae Iorga named this phenomenon with a phrase that has endured: “Byzantium after Byzantium” — not a canonical handing-over of imperial functions, but the survival, on a smaller scale, of the forms, the offices, and above all the cultural and ecclesiastical duties of the fallen empire, in the only Orthodox countries left with rulers on their thrones. Of the functions of the basileus, the Romanian lords took up precisely the one they could bear without imperial pretension: the founding. The Byzantine emperor had been the great founder-patron of all Orthodoxy; when the emperor perished, this mantle — not the crown, the mantle — fell upon the shoulders of the Romanian lords.

The facts are overwhelming in their extent. There is scarcely an Athonite monastery without Romanian founders: Zographou, whose great benefactor and second founder was Stephen the Great; Koutloumousiou, called in old times “the lavra of Wallachia” for the support of the Wallachian lords; Dionysiou, Saint Paul’s, Xeropotamou, and the rest, endowed reign after reign. Saint Neagoe Basarab surpassed the measure of all: Gabriel the Protos, first among the fathers of the Holy Mountain, who saw it with his own eyes, writes of him that he was a great founder to all Svetagora — the Holy Mountain, Athos — and further, to all the regions of the East, from Constantinople to Sinai and Jerusalem. At the consecration of his church at Curtea de Argeș, on 15 August 1517, the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, there came the very patriarch Theoleptus of Constantinople, with many hierarchs and with abbots of the Holy Mountain — by the chronicle, with the whole assembly of Athos — and the whole East knew who its founder was. And two centuries later, Saint Constantine Brâncoveanu maintained, from the treasury of Wallachia, Greek, Arabic, and Georgian printing presses, schools, patriarchates, and lavras, from Jerusalem to Iberia — one of the greatest Orthodox founders of his age, before the axe cut off, at Constantinople, his head and those of his sons.

And the founding was not measured only in gold and in stone; it was, at the hours of crisis, a sheltering of right belief itself. In 1642, when the East was reeling between the Calvinizing disturbance that had gone out under the name of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris and the pressure of the Union, the council that was to clarify the Orthodox confession of faith could not be held at enslaved Constantinople — it was held at Iași, under the protection of Vasile Lupu, the lord who supported the Ecumenical Patriarchate from the treasury of Moldavia. And the confession examined there was bound to the name of another son of these lands: Peter Mogila, descended from the lords of Moldavia, become metropolitan of Kiev and a founder of Orthodox learning for the whole Slavic East. The council did not simply receive it, but examined it and corrected two places held to be touched by Western theology — the teaching on purgatory and the wording of the moment of the change of the Gifts — and the text so corrected, translated into Greek by Meletios Syrigos, was received at Constantinople in 1643 and then by the other Eastern patriarchates. When the great altar had nowhere to hold its councils, it held them at the gate.

The steadfast instrument of this service was the dedicated monasteries: Romanian lavras and estates given, by princely act, to the Holy Places — to Athos, Sinai, the Holy Sepulchre, the patriarchates — so that their revenues might flow, year by year, to the enslaved East. In time, a considerable part of the land of the Romanian Lands had come to labor, through these dedications, for the whole of Orthodoxy: the peasant plowing a dedicated estate in Vlașca or Neamț was tending, without knowing it, the lamp at the Sepulchre of the Lord. No other Orthodox country bore such a burden, for the simple reason that no other still had, under the Turks, rulers who could bear it.

Here must be told, without evasion, the shadow of this history as well — for we told it of the wall too, and right measure requires that we tell it of ourselves. The system of dedications knew, in the latter centuries, real abuses: revenues flowing away unaccounted for, foreign abbots who forgot both the country and the poor. But the correction the modern Romanian state chose was, rather than a correction, a severance: by the law of secularization of December 1863, all the monastic properties — dedicated and undedicated alike — were transferred to the state. The government had earlier offered the Holy Places a considerable indemnity, with funds for a school and a hospital at Constantinople; their representatives refused the terms, in the midst of a legal and diplomatic dispute, and the payment was never made. From the standpoint of the old founding conscience, the act was nonetheless a deep rupture: the state was taking back what the anointed lords had given to God — even if it did so invoking real abuses and administrative needs, and even though Kogălniceanu himself said that Romania still owed support to Eastern Orthodoxy, but “with money, not with land.” The state being born was announcing, without knowing it, its manner — and was preparing, two generations in advance, the question of the monarchy, to which we shall come shortly.

The Hearth: The Prayer That Fed the Wall

The third service is the least seen and the deepest. By the hearth we mean, as we said, the fire in the midst of the house — and, without metaphor, the unbroken tradition of hesychast prayer on Romanian soil: the Jesus Prayer, kept burning from hermit to hermit, century after century. The gate is seen in the chronicles, the founding is seen in stone; the hearth is not seen — but without it the other two would have been a body without breath.

These hermits — of the forests of Neamț and Buzău, before Stephen and after him, of whom Daniel the Hesychast is only the best known — were elders without books and without foundings, who conquered no one in this age, and yet at whose door the lords knocked, by night. The hearth they kept smoldered for whole centuries; and in the second half of the eighteenth century, from it was kindled a fire that would light all Orthodoxy — and its story must be known by every Romanian reader, for it is, perhaps, the greatest gift this land has made to the Church.

In 1763, the elder Paisius, come from Athos with his brotherhood of Slavic and Moldavian monks, settled at Dragomirna, then at Secu, and at last at the great lavra of Neamț. There, for thirty years, the Paisian brotherhood did two things: it lived the Jesus Prayer after the old order of the Fathers, and it translated — by the tens of thousands of pages, into Romanian and into Slavonic — the philokalic writings of the East. Out of the school of Neamț came the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie, printed in 1793: the Philokalia in the tongue that all the Slavic East read. And the disciples of Paisius, scattered after his death through the monasteries of Russia, carried with them not only the books but the way of life — and from their seed sprang an essential part of the Russian monastic renewal of the nineteenth century: the eldership of Optina, with its chain of elders from Leonid to Ambrose, the saints to whom all Russia came, from the barefoot peasant woman to Dostoevsky and to those who would be the new martyrs. The Paisian current was not the only source of this renewal — traditions and men of the place worked alongside it, at Sarov, at Valaam — but it was one of its great matrices.

Let this now be weighed in the balance of our article: Saint Theophan the Recluse — the interpreter on whom the katechontic reading of the empire rests, the one who wrote that when Christian imperial rule falls the way is opened to antichrist — composed and printed the Russian version of the Dobrotolyubie in five volumes, one of the great labors of his life: that is, he stood, with this toil, downstream of the river that set out from Neamț. Optina, which fed Russia spiritually to the very eve of the abyss, was kindled from the disciples of the Romanian hearth. Which means, said plainly: the hearth fed the wall. Moldavia did not keep lawlessness far from the world — but it kept burning, both for itself and for the one who kept it far, the prayer without which no wall stands. Whoever seeks “the role of Romania in Orthodoxy” finds it here more truly than anywhere: not in any claim to the inheritance of Rome, but in the humble and immense fact that the light of Optina was kindled from a lamp of Neamț.

The Age of the Kings: The Crown Without the Anointing

We come thus to the most delicate part of our history — and to the questions the reader of today carries with him: what was, within this order, modern Romanian monarchy? Were our kings anointed of God, like the lords of old? And if they were not — could any of them have been?

To judge rightly, one must first look at the whole picture of the Orthodox nineteenth century, for Romania was not an oddity but the rule. All the Orthodox states that then emerged from under the Turks sought their kings in the ruling houses of the West — for the same worldly reasons: independence required the guarantee of the great powers, and the great powers required dynasties of their own family. Greece received first Otto of Bavaria, a Catholic, who in thirty years of rule over an Orthodox people did not pass into Orthodoxy; then the house of Glücksburg, Lutheran on its arrival, whose descendants were, it is true, born Orthodox. But here is the detail that says much about the age: the kings of modern Greece, even those Orthodox from birth, did not receive a liturgical coronation after the Byzantine image — they were set in their rule by proclamation and constitutional oath. One might say that the anointing had gone out of the royal ceremonial of modern Greece, and in that departure it is hard not to see also a forgetting of the order of old. Bulgaria brought Ferdinand of Coburg, a Catholic; his son, Boris III, was received into Orthodoxy in 1896 — his godfather at baptism, by proxy, through a coincidence that binds our articles, was Saint Tsar Nicholas II himself — but neither did the tsars of modern Bulgaria receive the ecclesiastical anointing. The only departure from the rule was Serbia: the only one that raised its kings from native and Orthodox dynasties. In 1904, King Peter I was first crowned at Belgrade, in the cathedral of Saint Archangel Michael (21 September), and only some weeks later anointed, at the monastery of Žiča (9 October), by Metropolitan Innocent — the coronation and the anointing being, in the fully accomplished order, two distinct acts. Not by chance was it Serbia — the land of the Kosovo covenant.

And here Romanian history shows itself less linear than we might be tempted to believe. The first reign of the united principalities, that of Alexandru Ioan Cuza, was that of an Orthodox; and Cuza, though elected by assemblies and set in place by the powers in the spirit of the constitutional age, did not remain outside the old order: according to a precise Austrian diplomatic report, on 12 June 1864, in the patriarchal church at Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch anointed him “after the old custom” of the lords of Moldavia and Wallachia. The first lord of the secularization of monastic properties was, then, by the same disquieting coincidence, also the last Romanian prince liturgically consecrated in the Byzantine tradition. The thread of the anointing was not broken, therefore, with the coming of any German: the ceremonial rupture begins with Carol I, who, at the proclamation of the kingdom in 1881, refused the anointing that was offered him.

For in 1866 the throne had been given to Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen — a man of rare worldly worth, a builder of the state such as few peoples have had: under him independence was won in 1877, the kingdom proclaimed in 1881, the country set in order. Nothing of this should be diminished. But Carol I was and remained, throughout his forty-eight-year reign, Roman Catholic. The Constitution required that the heirs be raised in the faith of the country — and here the price appeared: because King Ferdinand, his nephew and successor, himself a Catholic, left his children to Orthodox baptism, according to the law of the country, he was formally excommunicated by Rome, in 1900 (his reconciliation with his own church would come only after the Great War). The man bore the penalty and did not break the law of the country — a worth that deserves remembrance. But the state of things itself shows the structural incapacity of this monarchy: so long as he remained Roman Catholic, the king could not canonically receive the Orthodox imperial anointing of his own people.

This incapacity was manifested in the most eloquent manner possible on the greatest day of Romanian monarchy: on 15 October 1922, at Alba Iulia, at the coronation of Ferdinand and Maria as kings of the reunited Romania. A cathedral of the Coronation was built expressly — and the coronation was not held in it. The religious service was performed within; but the act of the coronation was moved outside — onto a platform raised in the courtyard of the cathedral, where the king set the steel crown upon his own head, the crown cast from the cannon of Plevna, and then crowned the queen. The moving outside had grounds confessional, constitutional, and political alike — the king was Roman Catholic, Queen Maria Anglican — and the gesture was grand: the crowd wept, the bells rang across the whole country. But whoever has theological eyes can read in that scene, beyond its tangled causes, an icon of the whole problem: the crown was outside, the altar within, and between them a threshold the order could not cross. Reunited Romania had a crowned king; the imperial anointing of the Church was lacking. And of Carol II, the first king of Romania born and baptized Orthodox, a single sentence suffices: he was never crowned, and his life disqualified him from being the image of any sacred service — his reign was, on the contrary, one of the gates through which the country was brought to ruin.

King Michael: The Anointing at the Eleventh Hour

And so we come to the question that many carry and few utter: but Michael? Could a king of a German dynasty be anointed? Was the dynasty “correct” — did it have the warrant to give anointed ones of God?

The question, so posed, is posed wrongly — and its correction is theologically fruitful. The anointing does not depend on blood, but on faith. God took the kingdom from the house of Saul and gave it to the shepherd of Bethlehem; Byzantium anointed emperors raised from peasants and from nameless soldiers, and the Church received them — because the anointing does not sanctify a genealogy, but sets a man, whatever his origin, under a service. The obstacle of the Hohenzollerns was never the German name, but the Western confession: not whence they came, but at what altar they worshipped. The moment an Orthodox king stood on the throne of Romania — baptized, raised, and confessing in the faith of the East — the anointing ceased to be impossible. And it was done.

On 6 September 1940, in the blackest hour of modern Romania — a few days after the Vienna Award had torn away northern Transylvania, with Bessarabia and Bukovina already lost, with his father fled from the country and a general concentrating power in his hands — the young Michael, at eighteen, took the oath in the Throne Room, and then, in the Patriarchal Cathedral, was crowned with the Steel Crown and anointed with the Holy and Great Chrism by Patriarch Nicodim himself, after which followed the Divine Liturgy. The ceremony, lacking the grandeur of that of Alba Iulia in 1922, was nonetheless a coronation and an anointing proper. On that morning there took place, almost unnoticed by a country dazed with disasters, a thing the Romanian kingdom had not known until then: the crown of Romania and the imperial anointing of the Orthodox Church met upon the same man. It was not the first anointing of a modern Romanian ruler — Cuza had received it, at Constantinople, in 1864 — but it was the first and the last Orthodox anointing of a king of Romania.

Yet the thread was being knotted at the eleventh hour. Michael was anointed over a mutilated country, under a dictator who reigned in his place, in the midst of a war that would pass twice over the Romanian land. On 23 August 1944, the young king arrested Marshal Antonescu and took the country out of its alliance with Germany; some three years later, under Soviet occupation, his own turn came. On 30 December 1947, summoned to the palace, he was presented with the act of abdication; according to his own later testimony, Groza had come armed, and refusal would have been paid — he was told — with the blood of a thousand young men held in prison. The king signed, and a few days later, on 3 January 1948, took the road of exile. On the day of the abdication the people’s republic was proclaimed; in the months and years that followed, the repression already begun was consummated in waves of arrests, and the Romanian Uniate Church was abolished by decree on 1 December 1948. At the end of 1949, at Pitești, would begin the experiment by which was attempted not only imprisonment, but the remaking from the foundations of the human soul.

The reader of our article on the Holy Tsar recognizes the resemblance, without our needing to point it out again: the removal of the anointed one and, close upon it, the consummation of the persecution. It must be said plainly that the forced abdication did not create the communist repression out of nothing — the infiltration of institutions, the arrests, the subordination of the state had long been at work; but the abdication removed the last constitutional barrier and the last living image of the old order. For a typological reading of history, the resemblance remains disquieting: what at Ekaterinburg had happened with blood happened at Bucharest with an act wrested under threat, and the fall of the anointed one coincided with the full conquest of the state by the atheist regime. This resemblance must not, however, be turned into an automatic law by which the removal of an anointed one produces, of itself, persecution. And here a second guard is in order, the same we set there too, lest piety slip: Michael was not a katechon in miniature. The wall of the world had fallen in 1918, once and for all; the anointing of a Romanian king did not rebuild it. Michael was the anointed of a people, not of the world — and his removal did not open the way of lawlessness in the world, which had long been open, but left without an anointed one a people over whom lawlessness, victorious in the East, was now pouring as well. The difference of measure must be kept; the resemblance of pattern, likewise.

The Vocation Confirmed: Confession Without a Wall

For here is what was seen then, in the years of the prisons, with a clarity that only suffering gives: the persecution reached Romanian soil only after the fall of the wall, and by the very hand of the one who had conquered the wall. So long as the imperial rule of the East stood, programmatic lawlessness did not tread here; when the wall fell and upon its ruins rose the empire of atheism, its wave reached, a quarter-century later, us also — brought by its armies. Chronology alone preaches: Romania entered the age without an anointed one not through its own apostasy, but through the collapse of another’s wall. This does not make us innocent — our silences and our haste in those years have their own judgment too — but it sets things in their place within the divine economy.

And how did this people meet the wave? With its old vocation — the one it had borne for five centuries under the Turks and had forgotten, perhaps, in the decades of prosperity: confession without a wall. No rule was found to restrain; there were found, instead, men to confess. The arc of Romanian holiness, which had begun with the founding voivodes and passed through the hermits of the hearth, was fulfilled in the twentieth century in the image of the martyrs and confessors of the prisons: priests, monks, peasants, and students who kept in their cells, with their bodies, what there was no longer anyone to keep with the sword. And the spiritual line we hold, on this site, to be the backbone of Romanian Orthodoxy of that age — Father Cleopa, hounded for years through the mountains of Neamț, Father Arsenie Papacioc, who passed through Aiud — is precisely the line of this vocation: elders who came out of persecution not with programs of restoration, but with prayer entire, and from it rekindled the hearths.

That this vocation is not defeat but full service is witnessed beforehand, across the centuries, by the very crowning of Romanian princely holiness. The arc of the voivodes closes not with a victorious basileus, but with Constantine Brâncoveanu, the great founder, standing on the day of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the year 1714 at Constantinople — in the very city where the empire had fallen — watching his four sons cut down one by one and urging the youngest, who wavered, not to forsake his faith. The Romanian crown was fulfilled not on the throne but on the scaffold; not through victory but through confession — the same choice that Saint Lazar had made at Kosovo, and that the Passion-bearers of the cellar at Ekaterinburg would make, in another manner. In the body of Orthodoxy, these endings call to one another.

The Members and the Body

It is fitting now to gather the threads — and to say openly that the synthesis that follows is our own, set in the key of the Fathers, not a teaching formulated by them as such; let the reader weigh it freely.

The Apostle Paul writes of the Church:

“For as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. […] And if one member suffers, all the members suffer together.” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 26)

This word is spoken, by the Apostle, of baptized believers, not of states or nations; we use it here only as a likeness, not as its interpretation. And it must be guarded from an error the Church has expressly condemned: in 1872, a synod at Constantinople condemned ethnophyletism — the subjection of the unity and order of the Church to the ethnic-national criterion. We speak, therefore, not of national charisms fixed by God in the nature of each people, like eternal essences, but of historical services which, in certain ages, these peoples bore in particular — and which overlap. In the one body of post-Byzantine Orthodoxy, Moscow bore above all the wall — the rule that restrained, with the grandeur and the sins of that task — but was also a hearth, through Sarov, Valaam, and Optina. Serbia bore the martyric covenant of Kosovo, but was also, in its own time, a gate in the path of the crescent. Greece bore, under the patriarch made ethnarch by the Turks — head of the whole Christian people of the empire — the memory: the tongue of the Gospel, the schools, the consciousness of continuity — but was also a founding, and a confession. And the Romanian Lands bore in particular the gate, the founding, and the hearth: the sword that defended, the hand that fed, and the lamp that burned — and they knew, in their turn, martyrdom as well, and culture, and power. No member can boast over another; and when one has suffered, they have suffered, always, all together.

And if anyone asks, at the end of this road, which of the services proved, in the fire of the twentieth century, to be the foundation, the answer holds within it a particular consolation for the Romanian reader. The wall fell and did not rise again: the age without an anointed one, in which we live, is the age of all the Orthodox peoples alike. The great founding has dwindled together with the wealth. The gate has no one left to restrain, for the enemy no longer comes riding. What remains — the only thing that remains standing everywhere — is the hearth: the faith kept without a wall, the prayer held burning under any rule. That is, precisely the service that the Romanian people learned, of necessity and from God, over five centuries — and of which that word of guarding, written in the article on the Holy Tsar, holds true: the Church does not hang upon the wall. Romania has never lived otherwise. In the age without an anointed one, the vocation of the poor gate has proved to be, for all Orthodoxy, the vocation of the last hour — and perhaps for this very reason God ordained that a whole people should learn it, five centuries in advance, in its own flesh.

The feast of the Royal Saints has taught us not to be among those who keep silent. The history of our people teaches us the other half of the lesson: that one can stand upright even without a wall — with the gate defended as far as one can, with the hand stretched out to the poor, and with the lamp unextinguished. The lords who sleep at Putna, at Argeș, and at Saint George the New in Bucharest do not ask us to weep for their crowns. They ask us not to let the hearth go out.