ELITA CULTURALĂ ROMÂNEASCĂ TRANSILVĂNEANĂ DE LA SFÂRSITUL SECOLULUI XVII SI IMPERATIVELE MODERNITĂłII
THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL ELITE FROM TRANSYLVANIA IN LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND THE IMPERATIVES OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: We are in front of a significant terminological impediment as we know nothing about the formative time of the Orthodox Transylvanian scholars. We could only guess, based on the results of their activities, what kind of education they received. The researchers of the Romanian cultural history date the birth of the Romanian Transylvanian scholar after the establishment of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church, and situate it in a direct connection to the western perspectives offered thereby. The extremely rare, but remarkable, exceptions that evade this reality (Gheorghe Buitul,Gabriel Ivul, Mihail Halici, to name only a few of the most famous of the 5-6 intellectuals analyzed) appear as striking excretions of the Romanians from Transylvania. Attendance of universities – a sine qua non condition for becoming intellectuals – represents, in their case, the element that accomplished their separation from the Romanian world, wherefrom they were already removed through their Catholic or Calvinist denominations. Being of no use to their nation, their intellectual adventure loses its meaning, remaining just landmarks of a possible experience. In front of the uncomfortable reality, defined on the one hand by the absence of Orthodox Transylvanian Romanians in university records, which supports the conclusion of inexistence of such an intellectual (that is Romanian and Orthodox) before the creation of the Greek-Catholic Church and on the other, by the undeniable competence demonstrated by the translators of the liturgical books printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of “cultural elite” (defined as the literate) becomes a fit option. The ambiguity of this definition is the aspect that makes it operable, because as such it covers a wider range of competences: from the category of anonymous scribes and printers to the editors of the famous New Testament printed in Alba Iulia in 1648, and from that of the clumsy translators to that of the authors of funeral sermons, a genre that was so successful at that time.The imperatives of modernity, perceivable in the Romanian Transylvanian society of the seventeenth century, consisted in individualism, spiritual reform, denomination, acculturation, and social discipline. The political and spiritual sphere of the Romanians remain uncovered: their lack is explained sufficiently by the status of “tolerated” attached to them. The most important achievement of the Romanian cultural elite was the ecclesiastic union with the Roman-Catholic Church, realized in 1697-1701, which occasioned the articulation of the first political program; it was the time when Transylvanian Romanians’ desire of having access to all citizens’ rights and obligations made its first steps.

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