« Renouvelons l’homme interieur ». Un modele de politique sociale et culturelle : l’humanisme hesychaste

“Let us renew the inner man”. A model of social and cultural policy: Hesychast Humanism

Abstract

This article is part of a cycle of three articles[1] dedicated to Neagoe Basarab and his cultural contribution in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Romanian Renaissance and Humanism, a mutation carried out under the auspices of Hesychasm. Focusing on the Romanian prince’s parenetic book, it comes in the continuation of the study “De l’Hésychasme Politique et Militant à la Renaissance”, published in Annales Universitatis Apulensis: Seria Historica, vol.28/2025, which analyzes Neagoe’s activity as a patron and political and cultural founder and will in turn be continued by a third study dedicated to the iconography of the voivode, all of which aims to uncover the relationships between small history and big History, tradition and innovation, new sensitivity and the universe of emotions of the period.

Using the tools of cultural studies, the history of sensibilities and emotions, and the hermeneutics of literary texts and sacred images, this study identifies in The Teachings of Neagoe Basarab to his Son Theodosie the inaugural manifestations of Romanian Humanism which came in the wake of hesychast Byzantine Humanism. In contrast to Western Humanism, in the doctrine of Romanian Humanism whose hesychast ideal is improving and healing the fallen human temporality through divine eternity, man must neither oppose Christianity nor dethrone God in order to (re)become the centre of the world.

Through the examples in his parenetic work, Neagoe Basarab proposes a kalokagathic model of individual life extended, first to an entire community of spirit (an “emotional community” according to Barbara Rosenwein), then to the entire people, and even more so, as an ideal spiritual and cultural policy, to the entire country. This gives the measure of what can be called the political hesychasm of the Wallachian voivode who very consciously assumed the role of king-priest and basileus builder/ctitor and patron whose mission was to preserve and extend Byzantine values in their most condensed and systematised doctrinaire expression in the hesychasm of the 14th century.

Before the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the latter had shaped and strengthened the Church and a model of spiritual and cultural policy to be perpetuated, in which man, aiming to restore his link with God, reorganised his life and his earthly city in the mirror of the divine one, harmonising everything in a kind of ideal “divine humanism” (Gelian M. Prokhorov) which is the expression of East European humanism in the post-Byzantine space.

[1] The idea for this series of articles initially arose from the conclusions of a paper presented at the International Colloque Intérieur / extérieur. Dialectique et représentations en dynamique (Italie, XIIIe-XVe siècle), organised on 9-10 June 2023 at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, by my colleagues Laurent Baggioni and Patrizia Gasparini, whom I would like to thank.