Petre Țuțea — Knowledge and Dogma

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” – otherwise put, “everyone knows” better. Can anything good come from a former Marxist who before WW2 repudiated the left and then entered a right-wing government as an economist technocrat, whose merits were admittedly awarded by two consecutive Romanian monarchs, but who was accused of fascist sympathies both by old and by recent Communist attorneys of the cancel-culture purge? Heidegger’s “man” offers a brilliant criticism of the “everyone knows” reasoning-type, which usually spreads “dogmas”. Yet some would ask if anything good can come out of someone who signed the Führereid. Well, in fact, Țuțea never signed anything of that sort. The present paper promises to deliver a description of the good that comes from Țuțea. In a way fit to defend the contemporary Orthodox Theology’s holding on to dogma, Țuțea offers the simple yet exhaustive description of what dogma really means. This “Socrates of the Romanians”, who unlike the paragon did not die in prison, shares this description in his over and over again confiscated and therefore uncompleted anthropological treatise: Omul. Tratat de antropologie creștinã (English – Treatise of Christian Anthropology).