PREDICA FUNEBRA ÎN MEDIUL ORTODOX DIN TRANSILVANIA (MIJLOCUL SECOLULUI XVI – SFÂRSITUL SECOLULUI XVII)
FUNERAL SERMON WITHIN THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX ENVIRONMENT FROM TRANSYLVANIA (THE MIDDLE OF THE XVITH CENTURY – THE END OF THE XVIITH CENTURY)

Summary/Abstract: Practice of the funeral speech entered the Romanian environment somewhere around the second half of the XVIth century, as a consequence of the attempts to attract the Orthodox Church from Transylvania to Protestant reform, especially to Calvinism For the second half of the XVIth century and until the second half of the following one, funeral speech had apocalyptic connotations, plastic visions on the tortures of hell being the preferred theme, and death only a consequence of sin. Despite the fact that they do not frame within official doctrine of the Orthodox Church, these funeral speeches sent the message that salvation of soul is possible also after death, by acts of benevolence performed by survivers who, giving alms for the dead, save them from inferno and also assure themselves their own redemption. At the end of the XVIIth century funeral speech is „confiscated” by protopope Ioan Zoba from Vint, who printed two collections of sermons, in 1683 and 1689. In his sermons, composed according to an Occidental-scholastic pattern, death is a manifestation of divine love and christian pedagogy, which brings to an end the falling into sin. That is why, salvation is not possible without performing good deeds, prayers, fast, attendance of religious services, pious donations, even if all these are to be made through intermediaries, whose attention is drawn on the fact that there is not time for saddness, but they must hurry in giving alms instead of death people. Funeral sermons from the period of dialogue of Orthodoxy with Calvinism enjoyed a real success, demonstrated by the frequent and their long handwritten reproduction, until late in the XIXth century. In a society where the divine service was almost the only educational source, their acculturative role and that of formator of Christian conscience was one of major importance, by far exceeding the practical one, of farewell said to the one departed definitely from amongst the community. As well, in a world in which printed book is still very rare and almost exclusively dedicated to religious ritual, generalization of the habit of preaching at the funeral represented a progress beyond doubt, as in the Oriental Church such an honour was reserved only to the most important characters from the political or ecclesiastical environment. From this perspective, even if the message of the Romanian funeral sermon was already one obsolete in Occident, in the Transylvanian rural environment it represented a giant step towards authentic Christian living, towards modernity in the long run. Even today within clerical environments it is said that priests from Transylvania are much more experimented orators than those from the rest of the Romanian territory.

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