God starts with the roof while we must start with the foundation

At the end of August 2009, Andrei Pleșu came to the school in Bunești and gave a lecture on the Meaning of Culture. It was attended by the students and teachers of the school, as well as by craftsmen and villagers from Bunești, Zărnești, Bohari and other villages of the Mălureni commune and even further afield.

Given that the architectural project was in its infancy and the models of the buildings had just passed the first stage of modeling, but especially because it had been raining for several days, the whole site was flooded and the inner courtyard had turned into a puddle, the question was raised very directly whether the school in Bunești could be a place of refuge for culture. The teaching word came up in a dialog in which Professor Pleșu formulated a thought, which I perceived as dedicated to the Bunești School and that is why I chose it as the title of this chapter.

To our questions about the way schooling is going on nowadays, but also about the chance to make a different kind of school, starting from the ideal of the philosophical schools of antiquity or from the schools of the great books, Andrei Pleșu began his speech as follows:

The school should not be the place where you receive information, willy-nilly, but the place where you acquire a formation: the formation of the whole man. In the same way, culture is not strictly the prerogative of a few people with very many diopters, isolated, voiceless, among the shelves of libraries. True culture is fuel, living energy, not a kind of sitting on the sidelines, but the optimal basis of wise action. I remember that when I met him for the first time, Constantin Noica wanted to know something about my past and, as a young man, I had to confess to him that, after high school, I wanted to become an actor and I went so far that I took an exam and passed it... Then I felt something was wrong and I gave up. The funny thing is that Mr. Noica, hearing my story and finding out that Liiceanu also wanted to be an actor, was speechless for a few minutes, and then he asked: "Are you saying that you, at 18, had not yet discovered culture?". I mean, for him, acting had nothing to do with books. In any case, he was astonished, because he seemed to have a very different image of culture from ours. But I see now that his image of culture may be related to what you are doing here in Bunesti. Because his dream from his youth and until his late years was to build a cula that would host a school of wisdom, where young people could come, without a fixed program, and live together in a colloquial way, around a few books, around a few pieces of good music. He dreamed all his life of building such a school and eventually did it, in Andronache, near Bucharest, where he was unable to put his project into practice because of the communist regime. But the idea of a building to house a fact of culture continued to visit him and I think he would have been delighted to see something like this being born here, in the space of the Bunești School.

I think they are already contained in your list. So, taken quickly, I would recommend a meditation on the Gospel parable of the house built on the sand: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like the wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the great rivers came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock. And whoever hears these words of mine and does not fulfill them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the great floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell. And her fall was great. And when Jesus finished these words, the crowds were amazed at his teaching. For he taught them as one having power, and not as their scribes taught them." Having occupied myself for some time with the exegesis of the parables, I can confess that some modern commentaries on this Gospel passage are a testament to how much scholarship can rave about a text. Were the two houses evoked in the parable next to each other, or were they at a distance? - some ask. An empty question. First that you can't answer, and second, even if you could, it would do nothing to help our understanding of the parable. Another "question": what did the technique of laying the foundation look like in first-century Palestine? What do you do when all you have on hand is sand? Well, let's read Vitruvius. It follows that without Vitruvius you have no chance of understanding the parable... I am not recommending this parable to you because it will give you some ideas about architecture, but as a source of reflection on what kind of School you want to found. I think, for example, that what might be gleaned from the architectural metaphors of Scripture is that man's way of building is the reverse of God's way of building. God begins with the roof, whereas we must begin with the foundation.

Why am I captivated by my trip to Bunesti?

Because I met there a lot of young people willing to spend their time in precarious conditions (no electricity, no running water) for the sake of a few ideas and a few people. Because, alongside the students, local craftsmen work there, amazed to discover that what their parents and grandparents did can still be valuable. Because Petre Guran has decided to make a family heirloom land available to this project instead of turning it into a lucrative business.

And because I heard people talking, in the Bunești glade, about wisdom, honor, manners and seriousness, i.e. about things not yet included in the various official efforts to reform Romanian education.

Andrei Pleșu

What are the books you would put in the young architect's hands?

I think they are already on your list. So, taken quickly, I would recommend a meditation on the Gospel parable of the house built on the sand: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like the wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the great rivers came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock. And whoever hears these words of mine and does not fulfill them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the great floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell. And her fall was great. And when Jesus finished these words, the crowds were amazed at his teaching. For he taught them as one having power, and not as their scribes taught them." Having occupied myself for some time with the exegesis of the parables, I can confess that some modern commentaries on this Gospel passage are a testament to how much scholarship can rave about a text. Were the two houses evoked in the parable next to each other, or were they at a distance? - some ask. An empty question. First that you can't answer, and second, even if you could, it would do nothing to help our understanding of the parable. Another "question": what did the technique of laying the foundation look like in first-century Palestine? What do you do when all you have on hand is sand? Well, let's read Vitruvius. It follows that without Vitruvius you have no chance of understanding the parable... I am not recommending this parable to you because it will give you some ideas about architecture, but as a source of reflection on what kind of School you want to found. I think, for example, that what might be gleaned from the architectural metaphors of Scripture is that man's way of building is the reverse of God's way of building. God begins with the roof, whereas we must begin with the foundation.

LIST OF BOOKS FROM ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES

1. Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

2. Herodotus, Histories

3. Aeschylus, The Oresteia; Sophocles, Antigone; Euripides, Bacchae

4. Plato, Gorgias, Protagoras, Apology of Socrates, Banquet and Parmenides

5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

6. Vergilius, Aeneid

7. Ovid, Metamorphoses

8. Cicero, On Friendship, On Duties

9. The Handbook of Epictetus and the Musings of Marcus Aurelius

10. Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Maccabees, Gospels, Acts

11. Augustine, Confessions

12. Life of Alexander the Great (Alexandria)

13. Life of Saints Varlaam and Joasaph

14. The Song of the Nibelungen and/or Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, Perceval, Yvain

15. Dante, Inferno

LIST OF BOOKS FROM THE MODERN PERIOD

1. Machiavelli, The Prince

2. Cervantes, Don Quixote

3. Montaigne, The Essays

4. Shakespeare, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, The Tempest, Macbeth

5. Pascal, Musings (Pensées, 1670)

6. Molière, Tartuffe, The Gentle Bourgeois

7. Voltaire, Candide

8. Goethe, Faust

9. Balzac, The Shuans, The Skin of the Wise, Santa Goriot, Lost Delusions, A Dark Affair; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; W. M. Thackeray, The Vanity Ball: A Novel without a Hero

10. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

11. Tolstoy, War and Peace

12. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov

13. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

14. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle

15. Nicolae Steinhardt, The Diary of Happiness