At the same time, paradoxically, the content and use of the concepts were simplified; as a rule, to be tolerant means to bear everything and to be intolerant means to resist, reject or even to be violent. Consequently, to be tolerant means to be good; being into-lerant is mean. This is very simple, but ethically it is dangerous, for very quickly the conclusion can be drawn that any resistance is a sign of intolerance and therefore to be avoided. Thus rejection being a priori blameworthy, a tolerant person abdicates all discrimination and agrees that there is no such thing as good or bad, but only "different".

A good illustration of this dilemma is the snake story as told by Ramakrishma:

The parable of the snake is a clear example of what have to be the normal limits of a tolerant behaviour: understanding, patience, self-transformation for the good of others -- but not to subject one-self to self-destruction in the name of pseudo-values. From this point of view, tolerance has no value and no object. There are concepts and special words that allow nuances of phenomena which other-wise are treated generally but also permit a moral axis. In our times, tolerant behaviors usually refer to acts or deeds, psychologically eliminating, more or less deliberately, moral values from the field of discussion at least to make them appear relative and hence easier and close to disappearance. The generalization of the word "differ-ent" and the directive to allow "everything" that differs from oneself are philosophical sophisms and pseudo-civic values meant to justify psycho-social manipulations.

If the term "tolerance" cannot be avoided, then, it must be re-defined from an honest position. We shall understand by tolerance an acceptance of differences, patience and permissiveness towards those who express these differences in their lives, together with an effort at their rational understanding and emotional forbearance, but without the obligation to incorporate or be limited by them. In addition it is compulsory to discriminate between "the different good" and the "different bad" and not to accept the latter.

The principle of tolerance necessarily implies admission of the existence of an original aggression: physically or ideally there always is a certain interference by one individual with another by the mere fact that the first is different from the second. The degrees of aggre-ssion vary as do the perception and reaction on the part of the one aggressed who can feel a need for self-defense. Aggression in discussions does not necessarily imply violence, but it manifests itself in subtle ways such as demands for adhering to values, prin-ciples, ideas, institutions and social systems, very often in the name of "human rights". In this last case it is not rare for the aggressor to hide in the form of a victim.

There is no possible way out of this conflict without ethical criteria for a correct definition of the aggressor. In a word, tolerance must be framed in a moral field.

There are many aspects to this issue. Tolerance within institu-tions or the institutionalization of tolerance can be both simple word games and very serious. The question is which institution is or has to be made responsible for promoting and monitoring tolerance?

As noted, the confusion concerning what is and is not tole-rance/intolerance can be dispelled only through clear moral norms. Such norms and models cannot be expected from political institu-tions, at which level there are only different degrees of compromise according to temporary interests.

Focusing on the basic institutions: school, family and church, in present day school and church seem most capable of providing the criteria for the ethical concept of tolerance and related moral be-haviour.

The family, the traditional bearer of values subject to steady erosion, turning itself slowly into a slogan with utilitarian functions. The pressure to which individuals are subjected impels them to fight first for their survival -- physical or psychical. Competition in all spheres of daily life, generated mainly by pragmatic and financial interests, opens bearers of intolerance (the young are preferred to adults, men to women, singles to those married, etc.) suppressing from the beginning the idea of acceptance and cooperation. The adult members of a family are responsible for the welfare of their own family; this is the main value they can teach and the first rule according to which the family maintains its function.

Like family, school in turn is subject to financial and political pressures of the power structures. At the present moment, the ideology defended by school is disrupted by transitory interests. The only identifiable fragments are those belonging to tradition, but these are hindered in their effects by accusations of conservatism. Though disturbances continue, in the end the school will be able to assume the defence of an ideology, but right now the moral basis of this ideology is difficult to foresee.

A last institution remains to be considered, namely the church or more specifically the Orthodox Church. This one begins with a few important advantages.

First, unlike other Churches, the Orthodox Church is not deeply involved in politics. Inevitably, it has been touched by the ideological traits of different regimes. Nonetheless, the Romanian Orthodox Church always has been outside of political preoccu-pations in both senses -- from church to politics and from politics to church. It was a victim of the communism, but was not destroyed by it. It knew periods of development, but does not have ambitions to the political direction of social life. Its actions and interests were far less influenced by the different political games and upheavals, compared to other sectors of civil society; a certain consistency can be found in the ideas promoted by the church. This is important for trust on the part of believers because the spiritual guidance of the Church is exerted not upon the political and financial class, but upon the mass of the population outside of and subject to the intolerant forces of political and financial interests. In this way the norms promoted by the church have a chance to become the bonds of the social infras-tructure through open acceptance and clear adhesion by individuals to religious values.

A second important advantage of the Romanian Orthodox Church derives from the persecutions and deprivations suffered during the communist regime. They were harsh enough to awaken sorrow, sympathy, compassion and trust in the priests as transmitters of real values; at the same time they were not so harsh as completely to destroy the external material support (priests, church buildings, icons, Bibles) that stimulate the desire for belief and religion. In Romania, the communist leaders did not dare to raze to the ground all churches, to eliminate all monasteries, the Metropolitanate or the Theological Seminary and the Faculty of Theology. The destructions which did take place were carried out either at the order of the Soviet masters initially or under the sick phantasms of Cau escu. It must not be forgotten however that Nicolae Ceau escu organized his parents’ obsequies with great religious pomp, and the madness of destruction which came upon him towards the end of his reign was aimed not especially against the Church, but against the village, humane studies and the Church. This seemed to be a personal fight against the soul in its different hypostases, a manifestation of atheistic conduct before his intuition of spiritual immortality, not less characteristic than the behaviour of those who ordered him killed.

This Orthodox spirit which never left Romanians is confirmed today by the phenomenon that in the villages, where the church functioned relatively regularly during the communist regime, there is now a decrease in the number present at religious services, whereas in towns, where the surveillance and interdictions were much stronger by contrast, there is a great affluence of peoples in the churches.

A third advantage of the Orthodox Church is the massive presence of intellectuals within trends of religious thinking, espe-cially in the humanistic approaches, in art and literature. There is much less open adhesion to religion among teachers, which is important in evaluating the school’s capacity to explain and demons-trate the moral model of tolerance.

A forth advantage of the Romanian Orthodox Church is that it is already in possession of the models of tolerant behaviour.

These models of Christian tolerance are visible on a number of levels:

- biblical norms

- behaviour of the clergy

- secular history in its Christian aspects

- the Romanian Christian psychology.

It is premature to approach the first level of the biblical norms and examples. Hardly coming out of a regime of which the funda-mental premise was atheism and hardly entering a new period of political transformations in which Christian norms yet have no place, the common people bear distrusts from the previous epoch and have been hurt by intolerant financial and political action. Lacking mini-mum biblical culture, these people, are not prepared for Christian discourse.

Things are similar regarding the model of tolerance expressed by the behavior of the clergy and monks, but it also is peculiar due to certain characteristics of the Romanian people’s opinion re-garding priests. Romanians have always manifested a rather critical attitude in the sense that the clergy’s good conduct passes unnoticed as normal, but in contrast its faults and weaknesses are extremely harshly judged; folk stories, poems and anecdotes are full of ridicule of priests. This is not atheism or lack of respect, but a regular critical attitude of the Romanian peasant towards the whole community in which he lives. For him the priest is, first of all, a member of the community having duties to observe; he is not above the rules. In the same time, in the Romanian village the priest and primary teacher enjoy the full confidence of the people, being considered guides of the community and judges of its deeds. Understandably this tran-sition period with its subjective convulsions cannot be propitious for this pattern. But it is absolutely necessary that this model exist and be visible in daily life in order for the Orthodox Church as an insti-tution to maintain its spiritual prerogatives.

The third possibility in shaping the tolerance concept structure is the utilization of the historical facts, especially those of so-called anecdotical facts, stories and even legends related to the life and opinions of historical personalities. Being closely linked to Christian attitudes, these facts have been ignored during the communist pe-riod. Their reappearance in historical consciousness not only will lead to a revival of the national memory and conscience too long humiliated by exponents of the regime, but also will contribute to a Christian spiritual rebirth. A dignified mirror confers a new look to the one who mirrors oneself in it.

Over a long period of time the history of the Romanian people developed a fundamental attitude, explicit in all the Romanian chroniclers, namely, that it is not people, but God who makes history; who opposes God’s will fails; and the people’s sufferings are the effects of the ruler’s sins and of a bad life. Some facts exemplify this propensity to Christian spirituality in the deeds of some Romanians kings.

This Christian conception of history lies at the basis of the all chroniclers’ narrations and guided the rulers of Romanian lands. It is one of the treasures waiting to be rediscovered by the Romanian Orthodox Church. The Christian spirit in the daily life of the political class of long ago is a measure of the power of the Romanian church, not in the worldly sphere, but in the spiritual one.

The Romanian countries Moldavia and Wallachia were the refugee lands for Hussites, for the Jews from Spain and for all those who were persecuted for their religious beliefs. One of the first posi-tive remarks can be found in Rabbi Benjamin de Tudela’s account, about 1170:

Beyond the river Sperchio is Wallachia of which the inhabitants, living in the mountains, call them-selves Wallachians. . . . Nobody dares to face them in war and no king was able to conquer them. They do not really keep the Christian law, but give their children Hebrew names and call the Jews ‘bro-thers.’ This makes some people attribute them an Israelite origin. When they capture a Jew, they des-poil but do not kill him.

Leaping over years, there are other testimonies about Roma-nian religious tolerance:

The Italian traveller Raicevich noted in 1788, in his work Osservazioni intorno la Valacchia e Moldavia, that "Every sect and religion is tolerated to practise its worship without any hin-derance. In Wallachia there are many Franciscan monasteries. . . . In Bucharest there is a Lutheran church and a Jewish synagogue. . . . Being too numerous in Moldavia, the Israelites obtained the permission to have more temples."

Another sign, characteristic for Romanian Orthodoxy is the deep penetration of Jesus and Virgin Mary in the folk legends. This Christian spirit, reflecting the tolerance of the Romanian soul, reflects an original view of paradise and hell, and their inhabitants. The devil appears nowhere in the folk stories as strong or threatening for men. He is weak and simple-minded, very often cheated and beaten by the ninny of the village. The Lord’s pity for the one who fell is shown in short stories such as this: once, the Old Davy built a house without windows and then was working hard to carry inside the sun light with a sack. . . . until the Lord taught him to break the wall to make the windows.

But most amazing is the theory of Christian Romanians about the end of the world: at that time, hell will be not enlarged but, on the contrary, will be abolished. Peoples’ souls will turn more and more toward the Lord; Jesus’s Mother will draw one by one out of hell’s flames all the wretches tortured there; they will grasp the threads of the bundles that are given as alms for them, and in this way everyone will come out. Hell will remain empty and the devils, having no work to do, will turn into good beings and Our Lord will let them also into His paradise. But, of course, they will first have to expiate their sins.

Scarcely any people’s psychology expresses a more total understanding and tolerance than do these Romanian stories. And it is easier now to understand why this people resisted not only the numerous waves of invaders, but also very different sorts of calumny.

Multiple arguments prove that tolerance is one of the major features of the Romanian’s Christian humaneness throughout history. Moreover, due to the fact that the "Romanian is born Chris-tian", there is a close relation between religious and ethnic tolerance. The biblical principles of not harming anyone are applied in all situations and towards any religion and nation. What can be criti-cized is the person as such, not his or her affiliation. This is another trait of Romanians with its good and bad aspects, namely, personali-zation or the tendency to see and judge the individual, not the mass.

However, these affirmations seem to have much less support at the present time. Political and financial pressure, the powerful impetus of the survival instinct transforms tolerance more and more from reality into an almost unreachable aim. A natural question arises therefore, whether at this moment religion can offer a shelter in facing the moral conflict; if in a period of confusion and lack of discrimination, of attack against moral and communitary norms, the Church can set up a barrier against drift.

The years of change brought intolerance of words, acts and ideas; the fight for predominance leaves no place for empathy and understanding.

Firmness in justified behaviour is replaced more easily than before by a hardness in aim and means, together with an increased tendency to perceive the others’ acts as negative, whatever their value. The differentiation that today characterizes the value system is accompanied by a battle of a peculiar genre, perhaps specific to the contemporary transitional periods in East Europe. In the first years after Revolution, the intellectual class, pushed on to the political stage due to particular reasons of the moment, was allowed to use its own specific weapons, fighting like Don Quixote with eagerness but little more in the name of high spiritual and entirely non-pragmatic ideals, which therefore were irreconcilable with the new political and financial social aims. If before, the general judge-ment was that to live better was to have more material tokens for improving one’s culture, today this assertion is seen as naive. The choice now is simple, even rough, for intellectuals: either culture (creativity) or politics (wealth). Between the two social systems, genuine intellectuals, with their socialist salary, had a minimum for starting a normal business and acquiring enough power to protect their spiritual rights. As a consequence there was a strong migration of cultural personalities from the public field of politics/business to the public field of culture. Renouncing alien ways of life and tools, intellectuals now have returned to their natural ways of action, and we assist at a new offensive of spirituality, framed mainly in three broad trends: tradition, history and religion.

The Romanian world is acting on two value axises, less and less related to each other: political and financial interests, on the one hand, and moral and cultural aspirations, on the other. The responsi-bility for maintaining Romanian spirituality naturally is taken over by intellectuals, either lay or in the service of Church. Folk traditions and lay traditions are in corporated in different religious movements, born especially in the cities. The recognition of one’s own inner being by remembering the nation’s deeds, works almost the same way a person who has lost his identity together with his memory, finds himself and acts as himself from the moment he recovers his memory.

The chance for the Church authority then is to be recognized as a spiritual personality able to restore the nation’s memory. One of the remaining Romanian traits is to submit themselves to external authority as long as they see, or think to see, in this guide an authentic moral value.

Another good path for the Orthodox Church would consist in rejecting the temptation to involve itself in political life, and influence it in one way or another. Until now the Romanian Orthodox Church has understood exactly the correctness of this conduct: the only firm interventions belonged to the need to protect itself against aggre-ssion from outside political interests whether in a lay or religious form.

Nevertheless, the real force of Romanian Orthodoxy is in supporting the feeling of tolerance among Romanians. Its restoration in places where this has become weak due to attacks by the subvalues is in the new discussion of tolerance due to the pressure of immediate interests and the attraction of excessive intellectua-lism. Large zones of contemporary religious thinking are invaded by the virus of approaching biblical verities on the basis of a hierarchy of texts, under the burden of which the original religious meaning is lost. The freshness of direct contact with the Scriptures contributes to strengthening the capacity of Romanian Orthodoxy to return the right balance between tolerance and compromise. Father Constantin Galeriu noted:

For symmetry, having started with a text of one of the au-thentic modern saints born in a very remote and different culture, we will end with a Christian text, one of the most "intolerant" passages of the New Testament: "And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting. And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables" (St. John, 2, 13-15); "And he taught, saying unto them, "Is it not written `My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer?’, but ye have made it a den thieves" (St. Mark, 11, 17).

Returning to this kind of text may help find the way out of confusion, of a wrongly understood indulgence, and toward a correct delineation of the value of tolerance. This is protected through a healthy sense of dignity and through firm moral behaviour, which too quickly is categorized by ignorance or illwill as ‘intolerant’. Resto-ration of the original meaning of Christian tolerance is the road towards strengthening the Orthodox church, and to reinforcing human spirituality.

1. Gheorghe Gutu, Dictionar latin-român (Latin-Roman Dictionary) (Bucuresti: Editura, Stiintifica si Enciclopedica, 1983), p. 1229.

2. Dictionarul limbii române moderne (the Dictionary of the Romanian Modern Language) (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei R.P.R., 1968), p. 867.

3. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakri-shna-Vivekananda Center, 1984), pp. 85-86.

4. Simion Mehedinti, Crestinismul românesc (the Romanian Christianity) (Bucuresti: Fundatia Anastasia, 1995), pp. 98-99.

5. Stolnicul Constantin Cantacuzino, Istoria Tarii Românesti (the History of Wallachia) (Bucuresti: Editura Minerva, 1984), p. 159; 163.

6. Radu Popescu, Istoriile domnilor Tarii Românesti (the Histories of the Rulers of Wallachia) (Bucure ti: Editura Minerva, 1984), pp. 42-43.

7. Simion Mehedin i, p. 33

8. Bogdan Petriciscu Hasdeu, Istoria Toleran ei Religioase în România (the History of the Religious Tolerance in Romania) (Bucure ti: Editura Saeculum, 1992), pp. 49-50; 62-63; 74-75.

9. Simion Mehedin i, p. 80.

10. Ibid., pp. 109; 120; 125.

11. Constantin Galeriu, "Sintez a Ortodoxiei Române Contem-porane", Ortodoxia Româneasc ("A synthesis of the Romanian Contemporary Orthodoxy", the Romanian Orthodoxy) (Bucure ti: Editura Institutului Biblic i de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1992), p. 264.

12. Florin Buhuceanu, "Românul s-a n scut cre tin", IKON. Revist de spiritualitate ("the Romanian was born Christian"), IKON. Review of Spirituality, 1 (1995), p. 4.