"Puterea fragilitatii" / "The Power of Fragility", by Doina Cornea: Beyond Ideology and Towards Attitude

The texts of the Romanian professor Doina Cornea, one of the strongest promoters of individual and spiritual freedom during the communist regime, have been reprinted under the title Puterea fragilităţii / The Power of Fragility. These texts are set in two parts: one vividly confessional, a chronology interview taken by the Frenchman Michel Combes, recalling the time between 1945 and 1990 (the power shift time all over eastern Europe), and another one made up of Mrs. Cornea’s various manifestos and open letters sent to different local or European authorities of that time (including to Pope John Paul II or the European Council).

What immediately strikes the reader from the very first page is the high impact figure of Mrs. Cornea with her strong gentility and deeply rooted principles and convictions. But, as she herself states at one point, “ if you don’t have roots, how do you know where to go?”

A literature tutor from the city of Cluj, close to retirement age, Doina Cornea is dismissed from the university in 1983 after sending an open letter to Free Europe Radio expressing her views on the importance of spiritual regeneration and creativity and of placing moral values much higher than the material ones like money, status, relations, seen as advocates for fear and greed. After this first letter is radio broadcast, Mrs Cornea starts working on various translations of banned books, founds a cultural magazine and distributes texts in ‘samizdat’. Thus, at the age of 54, she starts her work on what she calls “unmasking reality” and struggles “to make people think”, in a regime where people are looked upon as equal instruments. In 1987 she is arrested with her son as a consequence of refusing the compulsory communist vote and showing solidarity with the Braşov workers’ revolt while supporting it with street manifestos and continuing writing open letters. For more than one year she remains under brutal home arrest. Luckily, the communism collapse takes place in due time.

What is truly remarkable in this book, I reckon, is Doina Cornea’s belief in the power of the spirit, as opposed to the power of terror. Fundamentally, she constructs her own life paradigm: terror, in this case the communist one, is meant to suppress the individual but the spirit, once recognized and activated, both individually and inside community, can transcend the evil itself. Accordingly, she is an individual fighting against ‘Securitate’, the terror institution at that time, and bets all her cards on the spirit. And she wins, as history proved.

Another interesting fact is that Doina Cornea considers her approach more than just political action, looking thus beyond the ideology of power, she considers it a “political attitude” in a larger sense, which involves the individual capacity to choose in every second of ones existence - “to choose oneself”. For a person on whom so much evil was imposed from outside, the only salvation comes from a constant attitude of reevaluating and improving the self. It is most stirring the fragment in which she recounts the imprisonment time as a source for knowing true solidarity and fighting the hate complex. Her means is the “spiritual exercise of ordinary things”, i.e. perseverance, the courage of humiliation, the courage of hope and justice in apparently minor daily acts.

“The spirit is something alive and extremely powerful, if you possess it…When you don’t possess it, you turn to the body, physical force, to violence”, she says.

Hence, it is understandable why for Doina Cornea “the ethical dimension should be essential in any society, the only one capable of making a society flourish spiritually.” For her, ethics is directly linked with Christian faith, the latter helping her “relativize political domination”, “protect the spirit against totalitarianism” and protect the individual “to remain oneself”. Accordingly, it is impossible to live without a moral attitude.