A Christian Scholar: Professor Virgil Nemoianu (1940–2025)

On June 6 of this year, Professor Virgil Nemoianu died. A long-time contributor to Crisis magazine as well as to other Catholic publications, this distinguished Romanian-American intellectual, after teaching at the universities of Bucharest, London, Cambridge, Cincinnati, and Amsterdam, joined the prestigious Catholic University of America in 1979. There, beginning in 1993, he held the title of William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy. A leading specialist in the field of comparative literature, he wrote important works on the aesthetic currents and doctrines of the last two centuries. More than just a scholar, he was, as Robert Royal has already noted,[1] a true mentor and at the same time a guide through the citadel of Christian theology. For a communist country under a full dictatorship (as Romania was before 1989), where the Christian religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular were severely persecuted, this is of exceptional importance.

Formed in the company of major intellectuals such as Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–1989) and Ion Negoițescu (1921–1993), Nemoianu adopted a Christian perspective in which the ancient Patristic and Scholastic authors mingled with Renaissance thinkers as well as with more modern theologians, among whom Cardinals Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac stood out.[2] I mention this for American readers who can hardly imagine what it means to live in a country where the atheist, “dialectical-materialist” doctrine of the Communist Party excluded any reference to the values and authors of the Christian religion. This is why the importance of a professor, intellectual, and scholar who professed a vision in which cultural values were in deep symbiosis with Christian faith cannot be emphasized enough.

For the English-speaking public, Virgil Nemoianu’s works on comparative literature are especially accessible, all published by prestigious academic presses: The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Harvard University Press, 1984), A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress, and Reaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Postmodernism and Cultural Identities: Conflicts and Coexistence (The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), The Triumph of Imperfection: The Silver Age of Sociocultural Moderation in Europe, 1815–1848 (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), and Play, Literature, Religion: Essays in Cultural Intertextuality (State University of New York Press, 1992). Of course, I have cited only a few. In addition to these, however, Nemoianu published an impressive number of essays and articles in both Romanian and English. But his most important cultural-theological work appeared in 1997, in Romanian, under the title Jocurile divinității (The Games of Divinity). Being such an important and significant work, I will focus on it in what follows by presenting some of its seminal ideas.

Identifying the roots of an organically Christian vision of the world and society in the Gospels of Luke and John, Virgil Nemoianu carefully records the names of important Christian theologians who contributed to the fulfillment of “the most typical and fundamental act of Christian humanism: that of responding to the world by assuming it, embracing it, showing that all that is beautiful, intelligent, and good in it is not foreign to Christianity nor incompatible with it.” Saints Jerome, Athanasius the Great, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, Basil, Gregory and John, Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, alongside Erasmus of Rotterdam, Pico della Mirandola, Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Hannah More, Jacques Maritain, Jean Daniélou, Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, Simone Weil, and many others are invoked by the author. But the major influence felt in such universal openness is that of Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, about whose work Nemoianu states that it “offers a kind of summa of this revival of Christian humanism at the beginning of the 20th century,” providing us with “a provocative synthesis.”

The history lesson is followed by the revelation of the structures and foundations of a Christocentric theoretical-cultural vision, which would be the following: the relational nature of divinity, the role of Christianity as a cultural model, and the nature of Holy Tradition. All these defining features of this Christian paradigm are “enveloped in two comprehensive realities that no one can doubt and that, I believe, are still valid. The first was the fact that any kind of human society must contain as an indispensable trait some kind of openness to transcendence; the relationship between the human person and God is constitutive and inevitable, regardless of what channels of communication or religious languages are used. The second was the equally indisputable fact that in the West, as on all other continents, culture derived from religion and was closely linked to it: architecture was tied to temples, drama to religious ritual, universities to the transmission of sacred science, music, sculpture and painting to the praise of the divine, even science and economics were perhaps linked to categories generated by sacred histories.”

In conclusion, the professor from Washington states “that for Christian humanists culture is seen as a kind of playground and interaction space for the spiritual, social, historical, and psychological.” The cardinal virtues of the humanism they practice naturally result from the mediating function of man, that unparalleled creature in whom Heaven meets Earth. In fact, what are the essential virtues of Christians? Here they are: the acceptance of uncertainty, courage, hope, faith, love. All more than necessary in the context of the post-communist Eastern society, but also in that of the Western society that has entered a post-Christian era.

Of remarkable importance in Nemoianu’s interpretation is an essay dedicated to the Swiss theologian: “Beauty in Hans Urs von Balthasar. Strategies and Achievements.” Clearly, he was drawn to Balthasar’s work because of the primacy given to divine Beauty in meditation on the world and man. For a scholar of literature and poetry, there can be no more significant subject. In his youth, von Balthasar studied in detail the works and thought of the great German authors of the 17th–19th centuries. His efforts crystallized in a monumental doctoral thesis, published in 1939 under the title Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. The fact that Nemoianu states that it “offers us a key to Balthasar’s thinking” shows that it was not the theological dimension but the literary-aesthetic one that was the gateway through which he entered the labyrinthine work of the Swiss author. What remained from this intense contact was a pronounced Catholic dimension of his thought, visible in all the chapters of The Games of Divinity.

In an extended interview published as a book in 2002 under the title Înțelepciunea calmă (Calm Wisdom), Nemoianu openly affirms his intellectual-Christian identity, marked by all his acquisitions from the world of Catholic theology. Although he never formally converted to Catholicism, he recognized its unique value and embraced it. As a member of the Orthodox Church, he emphasized the importance of the Catholic Church, which he described as “a fortified wall” that also defends the Orthodox Churches of the East. Without hesitation, he founded his thought on the foundation offered by traditional Christian theology. In fact, his entire work is a discreet apologetics of a Christian vision of the world and of man—a vision adequate to the demands and problems of postmodern culture. Professor Virgil Nemoianu’s contribution proves that any humanistic discipline, even comparative literature or literary criticism, can unite in a beneficial synthesis with “sacred science”—theology. In fact, only then can they enjoy the fruits of Eternal Wisdom.

NOTES:

[1] Robert Royal, “A Memorial for a Mentor,” in The Catholic Thing [Accessed: 26 June 2025].

[2] One of his articles published in Crisis, in 1988, is called “Voice of Christian Humanism: The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar”  [Accessed: 26 June 2025].

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