Ioan P. Culianu, an encounter in the time of exile

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”

(M. Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Turin 1967)

“On 21 May 1991 Ioan Culianu, a brilliant young professor (41 years old) of the history of religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, entered a lavatory of his department. Someone, from the stall next door, climbed onto the bowl, aimed a .25 caliber Beretta at his head and killed him”.

So writes Umberto Eco on the occasion of the release of a book that attempts to unravel the many enigmas bound up with the death of the Romanian scholar of enormous prestige, considered the sole heir of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade.
The book, titled Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton, of which an Italian translation also exists (2007), retraces the life, the works, the encounters of Ioan P. Culianu, from Ceausescu’s Romania to Italy and finally his landing in America, with the academic honours and the lived reality of personal ties, up to that tragic end.
It seems the ideal plot for a detective story in, precisely, the American manner; instead reality has written one of the most perfect tales, a fiction realized according to those turns dear to Borges and to Culianu himself.
In the preface, Ted Anton confesses that he never met or had any direct contact with Culianu, whereas I owe this article to the opposite reason: our encounter during his Perugia period, in the years 1973 and ’74, just the right time to weave a relationship and an exchange of letters, also by virtue of our respective movements, his certainly more radical. At that time he had just slipped free of the grip of the Romanian regime.
In that period, in fact, we were bound by an intense relationship, above all through writing, and this because he stayed in Perugia only a few months, the time to seek some adequate resource that would let him continue his studies. Travelling between Rome and Milan, in the difficult uncertainties of academic and institutional contacts, with our letters we held firm a bond of exchange and mutual understanding, so much so as to allow ourselves even some harshness and a polemical edge, especially at the beginning, inevitable given the character, the milieu and the experiences of origin; enormously hard and complex were his, coming from Ceausescu’s Romania, something that would mark him to the end, however one settles the hypothesis on responsibility for the murder, which it seems reasonable to attribute to drifts of the notorious Securitate, a secret police that survived the collapse of that regime.
But I do not intend here to deepen the inquiry into the circumstances of the murder; I only touch on the fact that a disturbing trail connects historical antecedents such as the Romanian Iron Guard to elements enlisted in the regime’s police, active even after its fall[1].
To know this reality, which put Mircea Eliade under accusation, provoking also a severe judgment on Culianu’s part, the study by Furio Jesi remains exemplary, Cultura di destra, (Garzanti, 1979), which reveals the uniqueness and the mystical and esoteric character of the Iron Guard movement founded by Corneliu Codreanu in the 1930s. The manner of the murder, with its evident form of humiliation, the threats that had accumulated in the preceding period, when Culianu’s writings and public interventions scorned and ridiculed a certain Romanian political class, point to that portion of exiles very present in the Chicago community and involved in the movement.
These lines, then, are the testimony of a shadow now fleeting and yet indelible; there remains the bitterness I already felt at that time, long before his end: having been witness to the difficulties and precariousness of that enormous talent; for the academic bodies, with few exceptions, long ignored an eminent personality who, at little more than twenty, spoke and wrote several languages, Italian very well; he translated Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, had profound historical-philosophical and literary learning, and yet in the country closest to his own in history and culture he struggled bitterly to find an adequate post, precisely in the period when he was most uncertain and alone.
When he arrived in Perugia, first from Romania and then from obscure and sad places in northern Italy, he introduced himself as Giovanni, Giovanni Culiano. It was his first form of adaptation to the new situation, a translation that seemed to him necessary, a prudent way not to suffer distortions and misunderstandings.
This explains much: he arrived as a refugee, which is a less demeaning term than emigrant, though certainly different from being simply a foreign guest, in which case he would indeed have had a right to his Romanian name.
But perhaps these are my own impressions, because pride was precisely a distinctive trait of his; it showed through in the reticence of his daily precariousness, it glittered in the polyglot scholar, a citizen of the world worn down by a grim and ferocious regime.
That severe and fragile distance was somewhat softened by a few friends; one in particular who often hosted him at his home, a kind of harbour for friends and acquaintances, some only passing through. That house offered encounters that were often random and haphazard, but the law of chaos almost always brought experiences and characters into accord. We were among them.
One should know that on the ground floor there was a rather dark room, adjacent to the main entrance, and the master of the house had decided to carry its aspect to the extreme consequences by painting it entirely black. At that point Giovanni suggests writing on it passages in Sanskrit drawn from capital texts, surely the Bhagavad Gita; and indeed those signs, incomprehensible to all, aroused impressions of an almost magical beauty and power.
The sentences in pale paint on a black ground, in part also bright red, had transformed that room into a cavern that was even unsettling and at the same time into a place of recollection: the final effect certainly did not invite carefree chatter, it seemed a little domestic temple for haphazard initiates, in the best of cases!
So for a certain period, every now and then Giovanni arrives and sets to work, or rather to writing, silent and withdrawn. Once the session was over, we would find ourselves talking, coming to know one another.
And so, at the first occasions of dialogue, sharp words emerge. The pretext a book, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which had stunned me and which I had read a short time before in the only Italian translation then published[2]. But once he had learned of certain of my gauchiste positions, Giovanni observes at the first occasion, indeed he writes it to me, that this was precisely the author whom “my friends” had had killed. Mortified and a little stung to the quick, my reply widens the painful subject and turns decisively to aspects of life. An unveiling made necessarily through literature and philosophy, beginning with the evocative power of our names, the first step of a mediated intimacy.

Perugia, 27 September 1973

“So, you probably know that “aggelos” is not of Greek origin. “Aggelos” was a Persian word that designated the emperor’s messengers, while “aggera” were the places where these would halt and change horses. It is probable that the Greek word has a Persian origin. What perhaps you do not know, though, is the mysterious ambiguity of your name and of any name, and the amoralism of creation that transcends all experience. Experience is the most dreadful [stupidity] of time, the fullness of historical irony: it turns things into toys, and if you do not yet know it you will, in any case, come to know it.”

Then, in continuity of dialogue, in the next one:

Rome, 29-30 September 1973

“In short, I want to tell you that Ricci, the dearest dictionary of this angelic world, relates aggelos to the Sanskrit angirah, “messenger”, which certainly derives from the Skr. root ANG – “to move, to stir”. The angel, in the Indo-European world, was a stirrer, whence your vocation too is explained.”

If philology applied to our names seems the first key to personal identity, with due sarcasm toward my intemperances, how can one not read, in the closing lines of the first, the atrocious mockery of the fatal outcome, that brutal murder?
Its counterpart is this serene trust, or at least hope, ever guarded within the name:

Rome, October

“Angela, I am sorry that this world makes me incapable of remaining faithful to the symbol and to the rite and makes me thank you on this scrap of paper. You will know that Yohannan left the door open to your gift, because the name [Hebrew] means precisely OPEN DOOR. And this is why his good parents also gave him the name of Peter, which comes from STONE (Kephas), so that whoever might find the door open, on entering, would not cause irreparable harm for who knows what reason. So that strangers, entering through the open door, find a stone there and go away. Only one who is his friend will see runes upon the stone and will be able to read.”

We were two solitary and tormented people, he weighed down also by concrete problems, needs of every kind and surely oppressed by some mortification. We understood each other, we bound ourselves together, we looked at each other as in a mirror, truly ‘in the enigma’ of our existences.
The lucidity of the scholar, his boundless linguistic and philosophical learning, the signs with which he studded the many letters I keep, were like crumbs along infinite and interrupted paths on which we always found ourselves again, often walking side by side, along ideas and resonances.
In several places he comments on Soren Kierkegaard, mindful that he was a reference philosopher of my degree course, thanks to my teacher Cornelio Fabro, the first editor and translator of the complete works of the Danish philosopher, and it is precisely this Italian edition that Ioan reads and cites at a certain point.

Milan, 23 October

“You suggest: let me explain – but I will not say that this explanation is essential, on the contrary: it is pure existence, unum purum nihil, time and the vanishing of the moment. From contact with the culture of the Far East one comes to know that the world is new and total in every moment, whence Kierkegaard was right to define the moment as “Synthesis of temporality [et] eternity”…Kierkegaard had openings far more abrupt and full of hope than Heidegger, though at bottom, as problematicity, the latter descends from the former (but also as terminology).
Thus the trembling of a leaf sums up within [itself] the whole universe, etc. It seems that this is the theoretical explanation of divination: a glance at the unfolding of eternity.”

The last line touches on a central subject of his research. In all the letters there recur philosophical and philological themes of the History of Religions, in particular the attention to that system of knowledge called Magic, which he himself had made clear was certainly not the banal apparatus so widely popularized but the imaginative universe that had dominated Western science for centuries, when culture rested on faith. A fundamental reference author was precisely Giordano Bruno; a passage by Umberto Eco comes to mind here, who had indeed known and appreciated him, again written on the occasion of Ted Anton’s publication:

“The fact is that Culianu never asserted that the world is governed by magical forces, but simply that there exists a universe of ideas that develop in an almost autonomous way, through an abstract combinatorics, and these combinations interfere with history, with material events, in often unpredictable ways, producing different effects. If one reads The Tree of Gnosis one sees that Culianu held that «ideas form systems that can be seen as ideal objects» and that these ideal objects join and separate through a combinatorics of a mathematical kind (more than an alchemy, a chemistry or perhaps a physics of ideas).”

The consonance of themes and subjects then becomes a sign of explicit affection when he gives me his translation from Romanian of two poems by Dan Laurentiu, unknown to us. For me it is truly beautiful to be able to share them now.

Milan, 3 December

“Here are three poems, Angela [in Greek], from a friend (yours too, I think): to refresh Rimbaud with a Hellenistic-Oriental vein. Once I felt my destiny here; I cannot weep, it would be too beautiful, but it was only als ob [I do not know whether I can translate the irony too]:

There is a deep silence

But the city has lost its splendour

Here is an angel travelling without

A guide from here I pray you

Tell me dear

Is it not that a misfortune awaits it

Stronger than that thorn

That is seen on your radiant sole

O tell me you dear

Who know that I have loved more

Than any other the peace and the wisdom

Of a linden that shone in the depths of the sea*

Do you not believe that to that angel

Lost in these parts

A misfortune will befall

That it does not even await

Do you not believe that it will love

Do you not believe that it will die”

(Dan Laurentiu, Hymns to the Twilight, pp. 7-8, 1970)

crosswise on the page:

“*a linden, etc. – when it appears, I will send you a story of mine, The Tree of Ashes. Unfortunately it is in Romanian, but I will translate it. Right now I could not do it, because I keep no copy of what I write. Perhaps a series of little Oriental tales will also come out, in Italian. I could communicate with a better part of myself, since I am as doubtful as a samurai, but as infallible as a writer. But perhaps I will write one of these again, The Tibetan Runner, and I will send it to you for Christmas, to hang on a fir tree of bourgeois tradition but of venerable symbolic source…”

These few selected letters seem to me quite exemplary of the times, places and moments that marked the period. They were the years 1973-74, after which he had the chance to move to America, and then geographical distance became the ideal condition for parting us and affirming silence.
Above all he leaves behind the difficult Perugian and Italian period; then, of course, the difficulties and also the opportunities of that new residence occupied him completely, up to the tragic epilogue, after years of work and extraordinary recognition. In Perugia he had received many disappointments, also in some personal relationships, when everything seemed precarious, abandoned.

Rome 29-30, September

“I believe I feel a little nostalgia for that (;;. epithet censored) city, who knows why; in the end I felt almost at ease there and had made stupendous progress in civil life; for example, I ate three times a day, as in childhood memories. Just as well that I left, otherwise I might even have given up smoking.”

There are people for whom distance offers the only possible condition of intimacy. At least in that period, given how we were, this was our condition. With a freedom of sensations, of passions, of thoughts, of literary and poetic diversions that allowed us to say all the essential; what we believed ourselves to be, what was worth knowing and feeling, what we were seeking.
The silence that fell with his departure had something ‘suspended’ about it, like an interminable pause that then closed abruptly at the news of his death, especially in those circumstances. In some way writing was truly the ‘line’, as the Latins say, that bound our encounter; certainly an essential way of weaving ties, confirmations of belonging and presence. A perfect distance, a measure of possible intimacy.
At a distance of years I think of Giovanni/Ioan with a trail of affection and tenderness for the gift of his friendship, of his reflections, of his confidences, and yet now he speaks ‘from a faraway country’, and he would say, between irony and melancholy, it is fine this way.

If you were to remember

the walls

where without vengeful thought

and without loving

I dragged my wings

with the white feathers of solitude

you would see for yourself

the bird that flies

I remember no one

on this autumn evening

when I sleep in the tree before my house

and my leaves fall

perhaps tomorrow when I flow

on the black river on the black river

the ash returned from metempsychosis

will laugh at the four cardinal points

(Dan Laurentiu, “The Wall of the City”, in Vesperal Journey, 1968)

Notice
The passages cited from the letters are all by Ioan P. Culianu, since there is no longer the habit of making copies of one’s own, of which of course I know nothing more; the words in square brackets are written thus.
One detail may be of interest, and it concerns the fact that his writing often invades spaces alternative to the page; to the side and even on the edges of the envelope, so that on opening it one glimpsed another text. One might say that each letter becomes an iconic container, and this, for a scholar of the History of Religions, is significant, but it also reveals a communicative urgency in those moments of disorientation and exile; in the end his studies were the only possession he had with him, he travelled with more than light baggage.

Notes

[1] U. Eco, Un delitto troppo perfetto in “La Repubblica”, 30 April 1997
A young Romanian, born and educated under the communist regime, tries to escape the oppressive limits of his own universe. He discovers the work of a great historian of religions, his compatriot, Mircea Eliade, who has long lived between France and the United States, becomes passionate about the subject and – only with a few friends – builds an intellectual world of his own (Anton says he had found the possibility of rebelling not outwardly but inwardly). The young man feels oppressed by the inquisitorial climate that reigns in his country (he is repeatedly approached by men of the notorious Romanian secret police, the Securitate) and finally manages to obtain scholarships that take him first to Italy, then to France, where he perfects his research, obtains a professorship in Holland and finally at the Chicago Divinity School.
In this affair he suffers all the sufferings of an exile, seeks a contact with his own hero, Eliade, obtains it amid many difficulties and inexplicable resistances, but in the end becomes his collaborator and biographer. In this affair the young scholar, who knew little of what had happened in his country before his birth, discovers that by every evidence Eliade had been close to the Iron Guard, a Romanian organization of the extreme right, antisemitic and pro-Nazi. He questions the master about this dark aspect of his past, obtains from him only half-spoken confessions, and over time realizes that he was certainly close to the milieu of the Iron Guard, but always tries to demonstrate that he was not a member of it, and that he was certainly neither a Nazi nor an antisemite. But what can a young man understand of right and left who, throughout the whole period of his formation, was kept in the dark about the political affairs of the Western world? At first, according to Anton, Culianu shows interest in right-wing cultural circles, but subsequently his work and his writings testify to his democratic vision. Later he would maintain that the Iron Guard represented «the most secret, the most emphatic, the most mystical and the most foolish among the fascist organizations of pre-war Europe».

[2] Il Maestro e Margherita held an interest not merely literary for Ioan; indeed the demonological aspect of the novel’s various characters (Voland, Korov’ev, Azazel, Behemoth) implies Bulgakov’s profound knowledge of this domain. Culianu explains it well in an article: Nota di demonologia bulgakoviana in “Aevum” 51 (1977), which of course I read years later. Indeed when he mentions it in a letter, of Behemoth, cited in the Bible, apart from the translation “hippopotamus”, I in fact knew nothing else.

Angela Margaritelli works at the Study Centre of the Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria. An expert in the performing arts, she has long carried out activities of artistic and cultural promotion and dissemination.