NR. 3 – 2023

His life took a new turn in 1922, when he was ordained a priest. Fr. Grigorie Pișculescu was very much attracted by the Holy Land, perhaps also because of his future academic career, being a connoisseur of Hebrew and Greek; he travelled at least twice to Jerusalem. Gala Galaction visited the Cernica Monastery many times. He was fascinated by the monastic world, even though he had not embraced the monastic life; he often felt guilty for not being a monk. At least some of his relatives used to say that he equally felt attracted by Agapia Monastery, but he went almost every week to Cernica Monastery.

From 1928-1929 until the end of his life, Gala Galaction showed a passionate zeal for the translation of the Holy Scripture. First of all, he tried to carry out this project together with his fellow professor at the Faculty of Theology in Chișinău, Vasile Radu, and with the then abbot of the Neamț Monastery, Bishop Nicodim Munteanu, later Metropolitan and Patriarch. Afterwards, under the patronage of Patriarch Miron, he initiated another translation. Eventually, after much discussion, the two separated, and Gala Galaction managed to produce – largely on his own, but also with the help of his fellow professor – another edition of the translation, under the patronage of King Charles II, which came out in 1939. It was in 1935 that the translation process was resumed, and on March 30, 1936, the first five books of the Prophet Moses were completed, although it should be noted that the order of the canon of Scripture was not strictly followed.

As of November 1, 1937, Gala Galaction resumed his work at the Faculty of Theology in Chișinau, where he also made the final corrections of the translation. As it is written in his Diary, November 1, 1937 marks the end of this outstanding translation, the entire Scripture having been corrected and paginated. The conversion of the persecutor Saul was Father Grigore Pișculescu’s main theological preoccupation. The zeal with which he who was called the Apostle of the Gentiles persecuted Christians is interpreted in a unique way. Anyone familiar with the Holy Scripture observes Saul’s serious involvement in the persecution of Christians. St. Luke the Evangelist notes that he took part in the stoning of St. Stephen, one of the seven deacons (Acts 8:1). For Gala Galaction, however, it is not just Saul’s activity that is of particular importance, but also the goal he was pursuing, namely that of finding the body of Christ. Believing that the body of Christ had been taken from the tomb by his disciples and hidden, as the chief priests had said (Mt 28:13), Saul devoted himself to this search. Disregarding the testimonies of all the Christians whom he questioned and persecuted, he tried to find the body of the Risen and Ascended Christ. Unconvinced by the testimonies of the Christians he questioned and persecuted, Saul continued his investigation, convinced that they were either hiding the truth of the concealment of the body or that their words about the Resurrection of the Lord were based on hallucinations and not on real facts. When he heard that some of the Lord’s disciples have managed to flee to Damascus, he sets out in search of them and of the truth that had been plaguing his existence. It is on the road to this town that Saul’s redemptive event, his conversion, takes place. The verses that describe this biblical episode are given a new interpretation in Gala Galaction’s translation: “Saul, Saul, why do you follow me? He said: Who are you, O Lord? But the Lord said to him: I am Jesus, whom you earnestly seek” (Acts 9:4-5).  What the Romanian theologian is trying to show is that Saul was not seeking to persecute the Truth, but to discover the truth presented to him by the chief priests, namely that the body had been hidden.

Father Grigorie Pișculescu was born on April 16, 1879, in Didești, Teleorman, where he followed the courses of the local school. The spiritual path of the young Grigorie was not a smooth one, but with many challenges. On April 17, 1903, he married the young Zoe Marcoci, whom Grigorie had previously met as a sister at the Agapia Monastery. Immediately after marriage, Gala Galaction attended the Faculty of Theology in Chernivtsi (from 1903), receiving a doctorate in theology (in 1909).

The entire spiritual profile of Gala Galaction can be described as a road from Jerusalem to Damascus, just like another convert on this road, the Great Apostle Paul. During his youth, Grigorie was a convinced socialist, but not an atheist. With the passing of the years, he slowly but surely embraced the Orthodox Christian faith. Thus, in 1922, at the age of 43, on September 7, he was ordained a deacon in Bucharest, at the Stejarul church, by his friend, Bishop Evghenie Humulescu. The next day, on the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God, Miron Cristea, the future patriarch, ordained him a priest in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Bucharest. Miron Cristea personally praised Gala Galaction, after hearing him preach several times. He delivered his first sermon on February 17, 1902, during the Sunday Liturgy, in the church of Radu Vodă Monastery.

After being ordained a priest, Fr. Grigorie Pișculescu began to visit the churches of Great Romania, where he delivered numerous conferences, being listened to by young students, intellectuals and many personalities of the time coming from the most diverse fields of activity. He gave conferences and speeches in many places in Bucharest such as Dalles Hall, Romanian Academy, “Carol I” University Foundation, the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, but also on the Radio.

In 1926, he was appointed professor of New Testament at the Faculty of Theology in Chisinau until 1941, when he was appointed professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest. In 1947, Gala Galaction was elected a member of the Romanian Academy. However, he was shortly excluded from the Academy.

His most important theological-literary project was the new translation of the Bible, which initially appeared in separate pieces, and in 1936 was printed in its entirety. He started the translation of the Holy Scriptures in 1920, together with Rev. Prof. Vasile Radu (†1940).

His argument begins by analysing the completely inadequate nature of three concepts of “God”: (i) the medieval Aristotelian-Thomistic concept, the so-called “rational arguments for proving the existence of God,” which only extends the old Greek vision of a Divinity utterly indifferent to human suffering; (ii) then the Augustinian concept, which prioritizes “God one” over “God-Trinity,” thereby overshadowing God’s real involvement in history and the human life of the Trinitarian persons, especially of the Son of God; (iii) and finally, the modern Kantian concept, which, under the pretext that all reality must be subjected to “experience,” places the Trinitarian dogma outside any “possible experience,” thus isolating God in His absolute transcendence and making Him incapable of intervening in human suffering in general.

In contrast to all these “God concepts” utterly inadequate for the foundation of a real involvement of God in history and human suffering, Moltmann chooses a series of motifs favourable to his theory about “theopathia”, meaning “the suffering of God.” This includes the rabbinical and Kabbalistic teaching about the “Shekhinah”, the Anglican theology of the “sacrifice of eternal love”, the Spanish mysticism of “God’s pain”, and the Russian-Orthodox philosophy of religion with its concept of “divine tragedy”. Following these, Moltmann constructs his own Christology. Beginning to develop his own Christology as a genuine “theopathia”, a theory of the intrinsic suffering of the divine being, Moltmann shows that, unlike the concept of a “God insensitive and impassive to human suffering” of the medieval and modern philosophy, which is criticized by theodicy in general, the only concept capable of escaping these theodicean points of criticism is that of “a God who Himself suffers”.

Against this background, the great Protestant theologian arrives at the surprising idea of creation as an internal act of the Holy Trinity, as God’s renunciation of His greatness and His differentiation from Himself in the act of kenosis. But the most surprising conclusion of J. Moltmann’s Christology is his distancing from the New Testament and Patristic idea that suffering and death are “the wages of sin”, as St. Paul says, and asserting the intrinsically evil and susceptible to suffering nature of creation itself. Moltmann only confirms the observation that his Christology, and Protestant Christology in general, are nothing but a modern reinterpretation of the old Gnostic-Manichaean thesis of the created world, especially the evil matter from which it is formed.

Although he is known and recognized as a specialist in the Old Testament, Father Galaction also taught the course “Introduction and Exegesis of the New Testament” at the Faculty of Theology in Chișinau between 1926-1940. Indeed, later, from 1940 to 1947, he was a professor of Old Testament Exegesis at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest. His teaching activity in Chișinău is linked to the translation of the New Testament, which he published in two successive editions: 1929 and 1930. A few years later, together with his colleague from Chișinau, Professor Vasile Radu from the Old Testament Department, he translated the Psalter of the Prophet and King David (Bucharest, 1929).

These will form the basis of the 1936 translation, which is considered the second Synodal edition after that of 1914. In this edition, in addition to the New Testament, Fr. Gala Galaction also translated the book of Job and the 10 Deuterocanonical or Anaghinoscomena books of the Old Testament. Because of different translation positions and personal pride, the team formed by Patriarch Miron Cristea fell apart, resulting in the printing of an edition of the Bible by Vasile Radu and Gala Galaction alone in 1938 at the Royal Foundations, under the patronage of Charles II, known as Charles’ Bible.

However, later synodal editions of the New Testament, namely the ones from 1944 and 1968, also used Fr. Gala Galaction’s translation. An edition of Fr. Gala Galacticon’s translation of the New Testament was also published by Patriarch Justinian Marina in 1951.

Father Gala Galaction, as a writer and a man of letters, did not apply a literal translation as a working method, but a semantic or idiomatic one, in the sense that without straying too far from the words of the original text, he strove to make its meaning understandable, sometimes rephrasing it in Romanian or opting for a translation of some terms that would make the reading more fluent and natural in the target language (i.e. Romanian) and give it a meaning as clear as possible.

In this sense, with much courage, Fr. Gala Galaction translated the difficult text of the Christological hymn from Philippians 2:5-11, in a way that makes the message of the text clearer, which is very dense from a doctrinal point of view. Thus, in Philippians 2:5, the Greek verb phronizo in the expression: phroneistho en hymin translates it as „aveți în voi simțirea”, as opposed to „această înțelepciune să fie între voi” (Bălgrad New Testament 1648) or „să se socotescă întru voi” (Bucharest Bible 1688) or „această înțelepciune să fie între voi” (Bible 1914). In Philippians 2:6, the Greek harpagmos renders it as „pradă” as opposed to „răpitură” (NT 1648) or „hrăpire” (BB 1688) „răpire” (B 1914).

These and other examples are analyzed in order to reach the conclusion that the translation carried out by Father Gala Galaction was not a simple rendering, but a serious effort to translate as intelligible as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures in Romanian and that Father Galaction, as a writer and translator, was an outstanding and careful “gardener” of the Romanian language tree.

Another very important point is that since it has an intelligent Creator who brought it into existence, there must be a precise reason and purpose to it, which also gives the creation a meaning and purpose that it must reach. The movement towards this goal, which is the perfect development of the world in the direction envisaged by the Creator from the beginning, would not be possible, however, if creation had not been provided with the necessary means. More precisely, it must have in its constitution the powers that must be actualized to achieve perfection.

At the same time, since we are talking about a personal Creator, there is also a need for an alter-ego of Him, who represents the impersonal world and puts it in the fullest connection with Himself, for what can be this finality to which creation must attain, if not the sharing of the supreme good which is found only in communion with God. This is why the reasons (logoi) of the world were created in close connection with man’s reasoning, the world being able to enter communion with God through man, or rather, the effects of the intensification of man’s communion with God being reflected in creation.

God created man as an all-embracing and representative being: all-embracing, because he can unite in himself the whole of creation, and representative, because he is the representative before God of both the material and the spiritual world. The dichotomous nature of man is a prerequisite for his priestly vocation. The fact that man is at the same time a spiritual and material being shows his role as mediator between Creator and creation. His dichotomous constitution is the essential premise of his vocation to the world. He is taken from the general matter of the world, endowed with a living soul, and placed in the world as a leaven to transform it.

The world cannot sanctify itself, because this process presupposes communion with the tripersonal God, and it is impersonal. But together with man, it can enter a relationship with its Creator. It is man, therefore, who also transmits to it what he becomes through the sanctifying grace. Man is therefore by his very constitution the priest of creation. All that he does as an incarnate soul will also be passed on to the world. By ascending through his special relationship with the Creator to eternal life, he draws along with him the body and the material world to which he is bound, like a train.

Through the assumption of the human being by the Son of God, man was given the possibility of being deified and thus of uniting the whole of creation with the Creator. Both psychological and neuroscience findings support this claim. Constructivist psychology deve­loped by Jean Piaget, using the concept of embodied cognition, shows that humans have the capacity to take in information from the environment, which they restructure, thus constructing a new world within themselves. The latter is an image of the surrounding world, but not an identical one, but one on which the stamp of the human person has been imprinted. Further, man projects this inner world outwards, transforming the cosmos according to his inner becoming.

In terms of neuroscience findings, we have seen that every spiritual experience is embodied in man through physico-chemical phenomena that take place at the neural level and then influence the whole organism. Thus, man can bring into the materiality of his body, and from there into creation, what union with God offers to him at the spiritual level.

In conclusion, man has the vocation to be a priest of creation, whether he relates to it correctly or not. He necessarily transforms the world; he restructures it according to the truth to which he relates. By relating to the Truth of Christ, he Christifies it, and by relating to pseudo-truths he perverts it. The fact is that it cannot stop transfiguring creation, since it has this vocation inscribed ontologically. All that remains is for him to be its authentic priest, one who unites it with the Creator, and not an idolatrous priest who destroys it.