Nostalgia Paradisului
Nostalgia for Paradise

Summary/Abstract: Originally intended as a lecture on Apologetics for the students of the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest (1939), Nostalgia for Paradise by Nichifor Crainic, published in 1940, is an extension of the idea of garden in a broad contextualization of the semantics of paradise, with incursions into the thinking of the Church Fathers (Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory Palamas), into the Bible, as well as into the great literature (Dostoevsky, Eminescu, E.A. Poe) and the European art (Panselinos, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Cranach, Grünewald, Michelangelo). Once the ideational complex outlined, the author joins in antinomy “a bitter feeling of all the imperfections of our earthly lives” and “the high religious consciousness of the transcendent reality of absolute perfection”. The author’s summary of all universal aspiration contained in the nostalgia for paradise is to be found in two sixteenth-century artistic depictions of St. John the Baptist - the Byzantine icon and one of the late paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.

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