Radu Boroianu
President of the Romanian Cultural Institute 2015-2017
Minister, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Culture (1991-1992, 2013-2014)
Member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization
For my part, I would name the debate you are about to launch The present as the convergence between the past and the future. This would lead to a later highlighting of the European continent’s past, unique in the world, as a space of convergence owed to its shared Judaeo-Christian spirituality. It would, furthermore, be a clear response to the many that, under the nefarious influence of neo-Marxist ideology or political correctness, are calling on today’s youth to deride the necessary formative capacity of history and our shared past.
This would, in turn, open the way to an applied debate of fundamental concepts, such as the complex notion of culture which, to many, represents a minor concept linked to entertainment that only applies to the fine arts. In fact, culture, which has, in the European case, Judaeo-Christian spirituality as its superstructure, represents the crystallisation of the entirety of human creativity, from the inventiveness of craftsmen to the great scientific discoveries or masterpieces of art and philosophical thought. That is to say, all that which Europe, over an enormous part of its history, has gifted mankind.
It is not by accident that fundamental notions are pilloried with pejorative ideological connotations, followed by the accelerated diminution of the multiple values of teaching at all levels, then of education more broadly – a sector in which the institutions of the family and of spirituality have already fallen out of favour. The time-honoured confusion that religion pollutes minds, first voiced as early as the Enlightenment – although, at the time, Voltaire, Descartes and others were not attacking the substance of religion, but rather the deforming social power of its institutions – but who, today, reads what those elders wrote, when today the youth takes as face-value truths the simple and cursory sound-bites found across `social networks` that have themselves not appeared by accident!
The only formal yet profound European reform, directly and undemocratically imposed upon the bureaucracy-suffused organisms of the European Union without comment and, later, generalized to the administrations of member states and even to academic dictionaries, is that of a vocabulary with ideologically-modified meaning!
It will only be after European citizens, and those beyond, are able to overcome this handicap of formalised misunderstanding that we will be able to speak of a convergence of national identities that will be able to resume the discussion of a shared identity begun by the European Union’s founding fathers 70 years ago. It is only afterwards that globalisation, as a factor of the dissemination of ideas and not of the imposition of predominantly financial products upon emerging markets, will be able to become a notion truly useful to our future.
Of course, I am not claiming to have found the proverbial Philosopher’s Stone, or to hold the answer to the European formula – rather, merely of sincere opinions. For myself, as for others attempting to assimilate that which the exact sciences of the present have revealed, such as quantum physics or Lupașcu’s philosophy of the “hidden third”, the existence of a creative Divinity no longer constitutes an inscrutable mystery!
