The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian Legionary Movement Self Sacrificial Patriotism Vicarious Atonement and Thanatic Nationalism

Politics, Religion & Ideology
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The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian

Legionary Movement: Self-sacrificial Patriotism,
Vicarious Atonement, and Thanatic Nationalism
Mihai Stelian Rusu
To cite this article: Mihai Stelian Rusu (2016): The Sacralization of Martyric Death in
Romanian Legionary Movement: Self-sacrificial Patriotism, Vicarious Atonement, and Thanatic
Nationalism, Politics, Religion & Ideology, DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2016.1232196
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2016.1232196
Published online: 16 Sep 2016.
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Date: 16 September 2016, At: 07:58
POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY, 2016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2016.1232196
The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian Legionary

Movement: Self-sacrificial Patriotism, Vicarious Atonement,
and Thanatic Nationalism
Mihai Stelian Rusu
Department of Sociology and Social Work, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania
ABSTRACT
The paper explores the radical morphing of Romanian patriotism in

the aftermath of the Great War within the Legionary movement. It
shows, first, how the war martialized the rhetoric of self-sacrificial
patriotism articulated discursively during the second part of the
long nineteenth century that accompanied the making of the
Romanian national statehood. Second, the paper focuses on
unraveling the postwar cultural matrix that made possible a
radical, self-sacrificial, patriotism to emerge within the Romanian
Iron Guards fascist worldview. Within the Legions redemptive
political theology, the wartime national patriotism aiming at
redeeming the nation by making the Greater Romania was
rendered into a mystical self-sacrificial patriotism driven by a
messianic thrust and infused with soteriological tropes and
martyrological themes of Orthodox inspiration. The paper argues
that an ethics of self-sacrificial patriotism with the cult of death at
its centerpiece was instituted in the Legions conception of heroic
martyrdom which corresponds to an ideology of thanatic ultranationalism.
Introduction: nation-building, war, and the martialization of patriotism

As everywhere else on the European continent, the political project of Romanian nationand statehood building brought about the nationalization of patriotism.1 A nationalist
rhetoric of patriotism, urging Romanians to give their allegiance to the newly created
nation-state from the unification of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, slowly emerged
from a previous semantics of patriotism summoning peasants to show their love of the
country by obeying their political masters (i.e. state authorities, the nobility, and the
church).2 Precipitated by the War of Independence of 18771878, the nationalization of
patriotism was completed, as the language of patriotism has incorporated the tropes of
heroic death on the altar of the fatherland. Dying for the countrys independence was glorified in the romantic literature that sprang up in the aftermath of the conflict as a sacrificial
CONTACT Mihai Stelian Rusu
mihai.rusu@ulbsibiu.ro
1
Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 140.
2
Iancu Nicola, Manual de patriotizm [Handbook of Patriotism] (Iai: Tipografia Sfintei Mitropolii, 1829), translated after
Nicolas Scufos, Handbook of Patriotism Dedicated to the Inhabitants of the Seven Ionian Islands (Filadelphia, 1817) [in
Greek].
2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
M. S. RUSU
language endowed with religious concepts of national redemption first emerged in Romanian culture. Celebrated poets and writers, later included into the literary canon, hailed in
works such as Vasile Alecsandris Ostaii notri [Our Soldiers], Ioan Neniescus Pui de lei
[Lion Cubs], or George Cobucs Cntece de vitejie [Songs of Bravery] the wartime
heroism of Romanian peasant soldiers.
A sacrificial hermeneutics was employed that transformed the death of a soldier into a
self-imposed sacrifice while the assault on a Turkish outpost was rendered as a willingness
to offer his life as a sacrifice on the altar of Romanias independence. Thereby, adumbrating the transvaluation of reality later performed in the Legions mystical worldview, his
sacrifice became the symbol of the eternal transformation of Death into Life.3 Romanian
patriotism underwent a dramatic transformation during and especially at the end of the
First World War. The war brought about the brutal martialization of the patriotic rhetoric
that built up during the second part of the long nineteenth century, as the Romanian statehood was being politically constructed under the ideological driving force of nationalism.4 Mass death, mourning, loss and grief mingled with the excitement of having
made the Greater Romania in the aftermath of the Peace Treaties of 19191920, along
with the frustrations that came with the enlarged territory, set the scene for a new type
of patriotism to emerge.
This study aims at exploring the emergence of a radical, self-sacrificial, understanding
of patriotism within the post-war context of an ultra-nationalist ideology preaching the
redeeming power of political martyrdom, both for the individual self-sacrificer, and
especially for the corpus mysticum of the nation of which the former is only a part. The
argument put forward in this paper advances the idea that such a doctrine of sacrificial
patriotism came into being in a particular sociocultural matrix in the aftermath of the
Great War, into which the historical political tradition of Romanian nationalism was radicalized to reach its fever pitch in the Legion of the Archangel Michaels worldview.5 Methodologically drawing on discourse analysis, the study engages with a cluster of Legionary
and other nationalist writings in order to unravel the articulation of a self-sacrificial rendering of patriotism in the interwar period.
The paper draws on the double consensus emerged in recent fascist scholarship, both at
the general level of fascist studies and at the national level of Romanian studies of Legionarism.6 In doing so, it builds on the conceptual framework pillared on the works of
Emilio Gentile and Roger Griffin.7 The two have laid the groundwork of the new
Sorin Alexandrescu, Rzboi i semnificaie. Romnia n 1877 [War and Significance. Romania in 1877], in Privind napoi,
modernitatea (Bucureti: Univers, 1999), pp. 1946, p. 31.
4
A general historiographical timescape of the modernization process of Romanian society is provided in Keith Hitchins,
Rumania 18661947 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). A more specific analysis, focused upon the
endogenous tensions after the war is offered in Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism,
Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 19181930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
5
Although technically incorrect, since the Iron Guard was the political organization of the Legionary movement established
in 1930 and dissolved by the governmental authorities on 10 December 1933, this paper will follow the scholarly custom
emerge in the field of fascist studies in using the two terms interchangeably.
6
Roger Griffin, Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?, Fascism. Journal of Comparative
Fascist Studies, 1 (2012), pp. 117; Marius Turda, New Perspectives on Romanian Fascism: Themes and Options, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6:1 (2005), pp. 143150.
7
Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question
of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1:1 (2000), pp. 1855; Roger Griffin,
The Nature of Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993); Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of Beginning under
Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
3
POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY
consensus in fascist studies, founded on the harmonization of Gentiles approach of the

sacralization of politics and Griffins palingenetic theory of fascism as a revolutionary
form of ultra-nationalism that attempts to realize the myth of the regenerated nation
against the anomic threat of decadence brought about by the modernizing process.8
The contributions this paper brings to the extant scholarly literature on Romanian
fascism are two-fold. First, building on the fine scholarship already done in the field of
Romanian fascism in general and of the Legionary ideology as sacralized politics in particular,9 the paper advances the notion of thanatic nationalism in terms of which the
Legions cult of death and its ideology of martyric heroism are accounted for. Second,
the study seeks to elucidate the socio-cultural matrix and ideological milieu in which
this thanatic doctrine of martyric heroism could emerge. In pursuing the configuration
of this ultra-nationalist ideology, the study will focus on unraveling the post-war transformation of patriotism in the Legionary worldview.
The curse of the trenches: martial patriotism in the aftermath of the great
war
It was the dreadful experience of Marne, Ypres, Verdun, and Sommethe great battlefields delineating the quadrilater of death of the Western frontthat finally changed
the Europeans feverish mood of war from martial elation to stark disillusionment. Confronted with the meaningless brutality of mass-death in mechanized warfare evolved into a
war of attrition, the spirit of August expressing the war euphoria that seized the European
countries in the summer of 1914 gave way to a sober depressive realism slowly settling
down in the minds of the soldiers. The shell-shock affecting many men-at-arms left indelible sequelae both in their brains as well as in the cultural memory of the war.10 Previously
inconceivable death tolls along with the brutal misery of the trench warfare were needed to
downplay the nationalistic enthusiasm vigorously espoused by Europeans on the brink of
what would become the deadliest affair yet experienced by the continent and the world at
large. But the hot-blooded patriotic enthusiasm expressed so emphatically in the spirit of
august 1914 was not to remain cooled down for long. Turned dormant for a while by the
sinister legacy of the First World War, the heroic patriotism infused by a revived martial
spirit resurged with a vengeance in the aftermath of the conflict.
On the verge of the Second World War, political sentiments all across Europe had yet
again reached the fever pitch of nationalist fervor. The Great War left in its destructive
wake, beneath the bundle of rubble into which it transformed European societies, the
Griffin, Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age, p. 1.
Armin Heinen, Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail. O contribuie la problema fascismului international (Bucureti: Humanitas,
1999); Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Iai,
Oxford, Portland: The Center for Romanian Studies, 2001); Francisco Veiga, Istoria Grzii de Fier, 19191941. Mistica ultranaionalismului [The History of the Iron Guard, 19191941. The Mystique of Ultranationalism] (Bucureti: Humanitas,
1993); Radu Ioanid, The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
5:3 (2004), pp. 419453; Mihai Chioveanu, Religious Politics and Politics of Religion in 1930s Romania: The Redemptive
Hyper-Nationalism of the Legion of Archangel Michael, Studia Hebraica, 6 (2006), pp. 163178; Valentin Sndulescu,
Sacralised Politics in Action: The February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Moa and Vasile Marin,
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8:2 Special Issue: Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (2007), pp. 259269.
10
Jay Winter, Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War, Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1 (2000), pp. 711.
The term shell-shock, devised to describe the traumatic effect mechanized warfare was inflicting upon soldiers, was
already coined by Charles S. Myers as soon as 1915, in his article A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock, The
Lancet, I:4772, 13 February 1915, pp. 316320.
8
9
M. S. RUSU
fertile ground for political radicalism to emerge. The seed of war planted in the muddy
trenches into which the First World War was fought along the Western front sprouted
afterward into fascism, which blossomed as it was feeding itself with the nutrients of trincerismo, the spirit of the trenches. As keenly pointed out by Modris Eksteins in his work
on the cultural history of the Great War, what the haunting legacy of the war did, deepened by the economic depression already taking its toll by 1930, was to prepare the
way for a nationalist backlash. [] A literature of national re-awakening blossomed
as Ernst Jngers Storm of Steel, with its graphic glorification of war and slaughter, has
gained iconic status.11
In the Kingdom of Italy, the immense human costs of the war, unbalance by proportional territorial gains, created the social strife and political turmoil out of which
Benito Mussolinis Fascism was to prevail. The success of political radicalism had
become abundantly clear especially in Germany, the great loser of the war, where the
harsh conditions imposed by its victors, as set in the Treaty of Versailles, aggravated by
the Great Depression of the late 1920s, has set the scene for National Socialism to make
its theatrical entrance. On the Eastern flank of the continent, Romania experienced a
more ambiguous status, rising from the ashes of a defeated country as established by
the Treaty of Bucharest signed on 7 May 1918 to accomplishing its supreme goal of
making the Greater Romania. Unlike Italy, whose borders remained largely unchanged,
Romania doubled its size and population. But the making of Greater Romania also
meant that the formerly ethnically homogenous nation-state of the Old Kingdom had
to give way to a kaleidoscopic ethnic diversity. Just like in Italy, post-war Romanian
society was ridden with structural social conflict. The major difference lay in the nature
of this conflict: whereas in Italy the socio-economic strain was mainly class-based, in
Romania the same structural tension was ethnically-grounded. Both countries were nonetheless experiencing the sorrows and frustrations of what Gabriele DAnnunzio has coined
as mutilated victory (vittoria mutilata).12 In Italy, this sense of exasperation built-up
from previous frustrations derived from the perceived failure of the unification movement,
what Antonio Gramsci has expressively named as la rivoluzione mancata, the failed
revolution.13
11
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2000), p. 309; Ernst Jnger, Storm of Steel (London: Penguin Books, 2004), originally published in 1920 in German as In
Stahlgewittern. Eagerly embraced by the Nazi movement, The Storm of Steel was readily turned into a cult book in the
Third Reich, as Jngers febrile eulogy of war was used to counteract the pacifist agenda pursued by another classic of the
war memoirs genre, Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front (originally published in German in 1929, as Im
Westen nichts Neues). With Nazis coming to power, Remarques disarmingly realistic depiction of the brutality of war, as
against to Jngers fanatic extolment of it, led to the former being first banned from libraries and bookshops, and later
symbolically burned as politically and morally un-German, see Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 298.
12
Gabriele DAnnunzio, Vittoria nostra, non sarai mutilata, Corriere della Sera, 24 October 1918. After the Treaty of Versailles, DAnnuzio was still decrying the disfigured victory obtained by the Italians, which although victorious on the
battlefield, were projecting themselves as among the losers of the war: Which nation is more truly victorious than
Italy? And yet we are not winners, we are losers. We are more defeated than the Prussians cf. Alberto De Bernardi,
The World Wars and the History of Italy: Public, Shared and Disputed Memories, in Elena Lamberti and Vita Fortunati
(eds) Memories and Representations of War. The Case of World War I and World War II (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2009), pp. 7588, p. 82.
13
A. William Salomone, The Risorgimento between Ideology and History: The Political Myth of rivoluzione mancata, The
American Historical Review, 68:1 (1962), pp. 3856. The term had already gained wide currency in Italian intellectual circles
by the end of the First World War to account for the failure of the Risorgimento in delivering its promises of making a
united Italian nation-state grounded on social justice. In the wake of the Fascist experiment to revolutionize Italian
society, the term was refurbished to account for the failure of the Italian Fascism, see Camillo Pellizzi, Una rivoluzione
mancata [A Failed Revolution] (Milano: Longanesi, 1949).
A similar, although different, pattern unfolded in Romania. Here, despite the massive
territorial expansion, post-war enthusiasm soon came under a cloud of crisis, as Romanians felt that the political feat of making the Greater Romania was not followed by a consequent ethnic hegemony within the enlarged country. With the territories it acquired,
Romania also incorporated a large population of ethnic minorities (Hungarians,
Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, etc.) that were now making almost a third of the
countrys population.14 Especially in Transylvania, where Hungarians and Germans
were struggling to keep hold of their socioeconomic status and positions of power in
the state apparatus, but also in Moldavia, where the city of Jassy was overwhelmed by Bessarabian students carrying Communist ideas, there was the widely shared feeling that the
country was not ruled by Romanians. Against this background, all the territorial gains did
not prevent an excruciating perception of an incomplete victory to take root within Romanians post-war definition of social reality. A social consensus emerged that the making of
the Greater Romania (Romnia Mare) was not enough. This achievement had to be continued through an additional national revolution deemed to create a Stronger Romania
(Romnia Tare), ruled by Romanians themselves against their inner foes (Jews and Hungarians in particular). A Romania of the Romanians, only of the Romanians and of all
Romanians, as was put by Nicolae Iorga, quoted by Codreanu in his address to his
Legionnaires.15
The Legionary movement and the fascistization of sacrificial patriotism

It was in the post-war Greater Romania that the feeling of unrest associated with the sense
of obtaining an incomplete victory led to the radicalization of the already consecrated tradition of ethnic nationalism into a fascist-inspired doctrine of integral ultra-nationalism.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the students movement that swept the Romanian
universities in the early 1920s protesting against what was perceived as the Jewish dominion of university life. Student radicalism, rabidly anti-Semitic in its claim for a politics of
numerus clausus, provided not only the violent integral nationalism that the Legion of the
Archangel Michael would embrace, but also other defining features of the Legionary
movement. It provided the social basis of organization upon which the Legion would
develop as well as a pool for cadre recruiting. It was also within the students movement
that a first sense of generational messianism took shape, that was later incorporated as a
driving force behind the Legions ideology.16 Moreover, the face-offs with the authorities
during the turbulent period of the student general strike of 19221923 was the time of
apprenticeship in radicalism and political violence for the future elite of the Legion.
When students gave signs of exhaustion, Ion I. Moa devised a grand finale that would
14
The National Census revealed that on 29 December 1930, Romanians were constituting 71.9% of the 18,057,028 citizens.
Before the unification, the 1899 Census established that Romanians were making up 92.2 of the total population of
5,489,296. See Institutul Central de Statistic, Anuarul Statistic al Romniei: 1939 i 1940 (Bucureti: M.O., Imprimeria
Naional, 1940), p. 62.
15
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Pentru legionari [For My Legionnaires]. Volume I, 2nd ed. (Sibiu: Editura Totul pentru ar,
1936), p. 14; Nicolae Iorgas desideratum of a Romania of Romanians was a leitmotif running throughout Legionary writings, see for instance Mihail Polihroniade, Proletariatul intelectual i revoluia naional [Intellectual Proletariat and
National Revolution], Lumea Nou, V:2 (1936), p. 2.
16
Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Religion, and Ideology: Romanias Interwar Legion of the Archangel Michael, in John
R. Lampe and Mark Mazower (eds) Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern
Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), pp. 1953, p. 21.
M. S. RUSU
dramatically end the student strike in spectacular fashion. Persuading his comrades that
students were too weakened by a year of struggle to carry on the strike, Moa suggested
that it would be better to urge them to resume classes and us, who led them, to end
the movement in a beautiful way by sacrificing ourselves while taking down with us all
of those who betrayed the Romanian nation.17 The plot to assassinate high profile
corrupt politicians and Jewish bankers, rabbis, and journalists was circumvented by authorities, and the criminal conspirators, Codreanu included, were arrested and imprisoned
in the Vcreti Monastery.18 The group of five, who eventually formed the nucleus of the
future Legion, would capitalize on this carceral experience.19 The Vcreti prison was the
experiential site of Codreanus revelation, as it was there that he encountered the icon of
the Archangel Michael and had the prophetic vision of a Legion of youths who would
redeem the nation through their sacrifice, while the Vcreteni set the pattern of what
would later become the Legionary death squads. Codreanu first conceived the idea of a
death team in the context of the 1933 electoral struggle, when he set up an expeditionary
group of 20 Legionnaires capable of overcoming all the obstacles created by the governmental authorities on their campaigning tour throughout the country.20 However, the
term would soon assume literal meaning, shifting its semantics from a group of political
propaganda to a commando of political violence, when the three Legionnaires later celebrated as the Nicadors assassinated the liberal prime minister Ion G. Duca on 30 December 1933.
The students criminal plot of October 1923, followed by Moas attempt to assassinate
the traitor Vernichescu, is a paramount episode in the genesis of the Legions ideology,
since it is here that we found some basic ideas that would become trademarks of the movements uncompromising ideology of sacrificial patriotism. In Moas plea for carrying out
the plot we find the basic division between a self-sacrificial elite comprised of Gods
chosen warriors21 ready to undergo a sacrilegious violent martyrdom for redeeming a
non-heroic majority. This notion of vicarious atonement of a people through the heroic
martyrdom of its chosen elite is supplemented by a Legionary aesthetics of self-sacrifice
whose counterpart is to be found in the fascist aesthetics of violence.22 The paramount
expression of the aesthetics of violence is voiced emphatically in Marinettis Manifesto
of Futurism published in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. In the aftermath of the First
World War, the futurist cult of violence became an integral part of Italian Fascisms
aestheticization of politics. Within the Legions worldview, informed by the Orthodox
17
Codreanu, Pentru legionari, p. 168; The episode, embedded in the larger story of the student struggle, is also related in
Stelian Neagoe, Triumful raiunii mpotriva violenei (Viaa universitar iean interbelic) (Iai: Junimea, 1977), p. 265.
18
Complotul fascist-antisemit, Adevrul, XXXVI:12179, 10 October 1924, p. 4.
19
From the group of eight plotters who were arrested, only five will be considered the founders of the Legionary movement
(Corneliu Z. Codreanu, Ion I. Moa, Ilie Grnea Corneliu Georgescu, and Radu Mironovici). While some of the conspirators remained minor figures within the movement (e.g. Leonida Bandac, Traian Breazu), another plotter, Aurelian Vernichescu, the betrayer who revealed the plot to the authorities, was shot by Ion I. Moa on 28 March 1924 while in prison.
See Atentatul studentului Moa, Dimineaa, XXI:6247, 30 March 1924, p. 1. The Vcreteni, except Moa, were acquitted
the next day. See Procesul studenilor complotiti, Dimineaa,XXI:6249, 1 April 1924, p. 8. Moas acquittal will be pronounced on 27 September 1924. See Procesul studenilor Moa i Vlad, Adevrul, XXXVII:12486, 28 September 1924, p. 3.
20
Ibid., pp. 457461. The adventures of the death squad are related at length by the Orthodox priest who led the group,
Ion Dumitrescu-Bora, Cal troian intra muros. Memorii legionare (Bucureti: Blassco, 2002), pp. 72132.
21
Constantin Iordachi, Gods Chosen Warriors. Romantic Palingenesis, Militarism and Fascism in Modern Romania, in Constantin Iordachi (ed.) Comparative Fascist Studies. New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 316357.
22
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.) Documents of 20th
Century Art: Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 1924.
tradition, the aestheticization of violence was subordinated to a more mystical aesthetics of

self-sacrifice and death seen as redemptive means of collective salvation.
Besides the failed but otherwise fruitful student plot that eventually led to the creation
of the Legion in 1927 and the legend of the Vcreteni in the movements pseudo-martyrological writings, the year 1923 was an annum crucis in the socio- and ideo-genesis of
the Legionary movement and worldview. On 17 May 1923 the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier was inaugurated in Bucharest, after a lavish ceremony involving the entire politico-military-religious establishment.23 Following the post-war trend originated in the
Western countries, Romanian authorities decided to honor their 350,000 war dead
through erecting a monument to the unknown fallen soldier.24 After two years of tensional
neutrality, Romania entered the war in August 1916 for completing the national project
started back in 1859 with the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia. Incorporated
within the Mother Kingdom, Transylvania, the prized territory for both symbolic and
economic reasons, was to resurrect the old Kingdom of Dacia and the evanescent polity
ruled by the medieval prince Michael the Brave. During the neutrality period, patriotic
fervor was brought to a seething point, with the Entente sympathizers urging the
passive government and their fellow nationals to take arms and free their Transylvanian
compatriots. As with other belligerent countries, a sacrificial patriotism has taken shape,
impelling soldiers and civilians not only to support the war effort through material sacrifices, but more importantly to be willing and ready to sacrifice their own lives for the
superior cause of the nation.25 In the midst of the tumultuous times preceding Romanias
entering the war, passionate exhortations to self-sacrificial death could be heard all across
Romanian culture. One such voice was that of Barbu tefnescu Delavrancea, who on the
verge of the war delivered a passionate discourse to an audience of primary school children, published as Patrie i patriotism.26 Telling them that they owe to the country to
which they belong to sacrifice themselves for fulfilling the mystery of our historic
mission on earth, children are conjured to emulate the uplifting example of the French,
where the butchers child and the descendant of the noble from the times of Henry IV
stand together, fight together, and die together, seized by the frenzy of death, the glorious
death for the Fatherland. Children, the exhortation to patriotic martyrdom goes on,
learn from the thrill that seized France and raised her in the love of the world, from
how to defend the memories of the past, how we must die for the country of our
fathers and forefathers.27 It would be their fathers who will march to death over the
Valeria Blescu, Eroul necunoscut: istorie trecut i recent [The Unknown Soldier: Past and Recent History] (Bucureti:
Editura Militar, 2005); Maria Bucur, Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
24
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
25
David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 94, 106. Monger distinguishes between sacrificial patriotism by which
he refers to the acceptance of hardships by the civilian population as part of their civic duty towards the country (such as
food and fuel restrictions and longer working hours) and self-sacrificial patriotism. The latter refers to ultimate sacrifice
of martial death on the battlefield. Only the second, radical, version of ultimate patriotism is of interest for the purposes
of this paper. A similar self-sacrificial rhetoric of patriotism, implying the idea of a blood tax (limpt du sang) for the
patrie was becoming overwhelmingly popular across the Channel; see John Horne, Limpt du sang: Republican Rhetoric and Industrial Warfare in France, 191418, Social History, 14:2 (1989), pp. 201223.
26
Barbu tefnescu Delavrancea, Patrie i patriotism. Conferin inut de D-l Barbu Delavrancea la serbarea dela 24 Ianuarie
1915 [Fatherland and Patriotism. Conference of Mr. Barbu Delavrancea at the Celebration of January 24 1915] (Bucureti:
Institutul Grafic Universala, 1915).
27
Ibid., pp. 1213.
23
M. S. RUSU
rhythms of patriotic songs, expressing what a year later, the same Delavrancea, talking on
the war and our duty, would call as integral patriotism.28 Impelled by such warlike
injunctions, the First World War had brought the patriotic fervor that simmered throughout the long nineteenth century to fever pitch. The bellicose patriotism brandished by
national elites ever more increasing in rhetorical violence towards the fin-de-sicle was
eventually martialized at the outbreak of what would become the Great War.
Sermons were other influential vehicles of war propaganda. As everywhere else
throughout the continent, a war theology had developed in the Romanian churches.29
But while the Romanian Orthodox Church from the Old Kingdom was sanctifying the
war effort deemed to reunite all Romanians into a Greater Romania, Orthodox clergymen
of Transylvania were forced to do political lip service to the Dual Monarchy under whose
jurisdiction they were operating.30 Irrespective of their political agenda, in the midst of
war, Romanian Churches sacralized patriotic death, granting the fallen symbolic immortality in Christ and the eternal life of the nation for which they died. The fallen were cast in
a theological language as martyrs of the nation (mucenici ai neamului) who, by dying for
their country, gained eternal salvation for their souls. This sacrificial rhetoric of patriotism
unto death expressed from the pulpit and dais alike aroused a Romanian Spirit of August
1916, belatedly echoing the Western enthusiasm meanwhile turned into dreadful disillusion, to electrify Romanians into throwing themselves in the fire of war. The 350,000
Romanian fallen soldiers were to be honored by a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
erected in 1923 to preserve the memory of their sacrifice.
In line with the emergent pattern of honoring the war dead in the Western countries,
Romania followed a similar ritual process in selecting and burying her own Unknown
Soldier. Ten unidentified bodies of presumably Romanian orthodox soldiers fallen in
the most important battlefields of the First World War were first selected as a corporeal
sample out of which the Unknown Soldier was to be randomly chosen. The 10 bodies
were unearthed and transported to Mreti, the most important site of remembrance
in the Romanian memory of the war. In a sober ceremony, blending religion, politics,
and the military, a war orphanAmilcar Sndulescustopped in front of one of the 10
sealed coffins laying before him in the Church of the Assumption in Mreti and, pointing out towards the fourth, said This is my father.31 While the nine coffins were ceremoniously buried at Mreti military cemetery, the coffin carrying the remains of the
Barbu tefnescu Delavrancea, Rzboiul i datoria noastr [The War and Our Duty] (Bucureti: Institutul de Arte Plastice
Carol Gbl, 1916), 29.
On the idea of Kriegstheologie see Julian Jenkins, War Theology, 1914 and Germanys Sonderweg: Luthers Heirs and
Patriotism, The Journal of Religious History, 15:3 (1989), pp. 292310; John A. Moses, Justifying War as the Will of
God: German Theology on the Eve of the First World War, Colloquium, 31:1 (1999), pp. 320. A famous example of
war theology is Cardinal Merciers, the primate of Belgium, pastoral letter Patriotism and Endurance issued on Christmas Day, 1914, from under German occupation. Although not a martyr stricto sensu, Mercier argues, the soldier who dies
on the battlefield defending his country obtains the absolution of sins. The soldier who dies to save his brothers, to
protect the hearths and the altars of his country, fulfills the highest form of love. [] We are justified in hoping for
them the immortal crown which encircles the foreheads of the elect. For such is the virtue of an act of perfect love
that, of itself alone, it wipes out a whole life of sin. Of a sinner instantly it makes a saint.quoted in Ernst
H. Kantorowicz, Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought, The American Historical Review, 56:3 (1951), pp. 472
492, p. 472.
30
Vasile Mangra, Ioan I. Papp, and Miron E. Cristea, Scrisoare circular ctre venerabilul cler i ctre poporul dreptcredincios
romn din Dumnezeu pzita mitropolie a romnilor ortodoci din Ungaria i Transilvania, Telegraful Romn, LXIV:85, 11/
24 October (1916). The pastoral letter, signed by three Transylvanian Orthodox bishops (including the future Patriarch
Miron Cristea), blasts against the offensive launched by the Romanian Army in Hungarian Transylvania.
31
Blescu, Eroul necunoscut, p. 95; Bucur, Heroes and Victims, p. 123.
28
29
Unknown Soldier was prepared to be transported by a funeral train to Bucharest, where it

was to be buried in Carol Park. The funerary train stopped in numerous stations on its way
to Bucharest, where religious services (parastas) were being performed in a milieu of clerical militarism and liturgical martialism. It is one of the arguments put forward in this
paper that the funerary ceremony of burying the Unknown Soldier shaped the Legions
worldview in its nascent stage in at least two ways. The radical anti-Semitic students
who witnessed to the martial political liturgy of exhuming the corpses and reburying
the chosen one as the anonymous paragon of wartime heroism adopted and further radicalized the ideology of self-sacrificial patriotism into a political theology of martyrdom.
Secondly, the men of the Archangel also found, in the theatrically performed funerary
procession of the Unknown Soldier, a ritual pattern that they would re-enact in burying
their own fallen as martyrs of the nation and the movement. This ritual borrowing had
become abundantly clear at Ion I. Moa and Vasile Marins burial of 13 February 1937,
where a martial political liturgy patterned upon the burial of the Unknown Soldier was
performed. That the Legionnaires were strongly impressed by the symbolics of the
fallen martyrs expressing martial heroism, sacrificial death, and national redemption is
indicated by the scandal erupted at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on 24 January
1933. On the day commemorating the 1859 union of Moldavia and Wallachia, a delegation of Legionnaires led by Mihail Stelescu made a bid to raise a cross over the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They received the blessing from the Patriarchy to
mount a cross, but the government proved to be more reluctant towards their plans of
Christening the Tomb. Defying authorities, a thousand Legionary students led by Legionary priests descended into Carol Park, after they sanctified the cross at St. Anthonys
Church. A violent clash with the law enforcing authorities ensued, resulting in
wounded casualties on both sides, as students threw rocks into the policemen and the
latter fire their arms into the troublemakers.32 The crackdown of the Legionary procession
by the police was fruitfully speculated by the Legions propaganda, as the conflict was
hyperbolized in a Manichean framework depicting the Legion of the Archangel fighting
for the soul of the nation and the memory of the hundreds of thousands of hero
martyrs who died for the making of the Greater Romania against the powerful opposition
of the forces of Evil.33 This interpretive framing of the events in biblical language
ultimately paid off, since the Legionary students managed to strike a chord in the
publics feelings, who joined them a couple of days later in thousands to finally lay a
wooden cross-shaped wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.34
There is yet another thread connecting the Legions sacralized politics with the cult of
the fallen soldiers symbolizing the mass-martyrdom of Romanians in their strive to
redeem the country during the Great War. The Mreti Mausoleum was finally unveiled
in 1938, 15 years after the construction was started. It was to Mreti, the site of one of
the deadliest battles in the First World War, that the 10 bodies unearthed from all across
the country from among the Unknown Soldier was to be randomly selected, were reposited. An ectenie de oase was performed by a sobor of priests, who ritually washed their
bones in a liturgy for the dead. At the very centerpiece of the Mausoleum lies the
32
Clark, Sfnt tineree legionar, p. 115.

Mihail Stelescu, Lupta pentru cruce [The Battle for the Cross], Axa. Publicaie bilunar, politic, artistic i literar, II:6, 5
February 1933, p. 8.
34
Heinen, Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail, p. 205.
33
10
M. S. RUSU
Chapel of Glory, a circular structure adorned with Orthodox paraphernalia (iconostasis,

icons, candelabra, mural paintings). The iconography of the painted fresco depicts
various heavenly figures revered in the Eastern faith, among whom the towering figure
of Archangel Michael bearing his sword in his arms was unmistakable. Maria Bucur
has suggested that Codreanus followers interpreted this painting not just as a religious
symbol of heroism and self-sacrifice, but saw in it a validation of their own self-perception as heirs of the Romanian armys great sacrifices in war.35
The year 1923 shaped the Legionary mindset in yet a third way; 26 March 1923 was the
day the Romanian Parliament adopted the new Constitution, changing the notorious
article 7 so as to grant citizenship to Jewish and other minorities.36 The civil emancipation
of Jewry was perceived by the anti-Semitic nationalist youth, associated with the newly
created National-Christian Defense League (Liga Aprrii NaionalCretine
(L.A.N.C.)), in apocalyptic terms, as the end of the Romanian nation. Codreanu described
the infamous event as a great act of national betrayal that laid in the grave and sealed the
tombstone over the future of this people.37 This development was instrumental in validating Codreanu and Moas belief system founded on the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. It
was also in 1923 that Ion I. Moa had translated and published The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, in which the Jewish elite was rendered as the embodiment of the Satan
and as the causa causarum of all the evil in the world.38
The main argument put forwards in this paper is that the Legions ideology of martyric
heroism radicalized the wartime sacralization of martial death symbolized in the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier into a self-sacrificial doctrine of patriotism infused with mystical
notions of symbolic immortality, national redemption, and vicarious expiation of collective sins through sacrificial death. A political theology of redemption founded upon the
cult of death had thus emerged at the core of the Legions worldview, impelled by an ideology that I shall call thanatic ultra-nationalism.39 I argue that this political theology of
redemption had emerged within a specific historical and sociocultural matrix consisting
in (1) a distal historical background and (2) a proximal sociocultural context. The historical roots into which the Legions ideology tapped consists in what Constantin Iordachi has
identified as (a) the tradition of national messianism most evidently observable in Ion
Heliade Rdulescus theory of palingenesis; (b) the sacralization of politics occurred
during Carol Is reign (18661914) meant to legitimize the new dynastic order in Romanian politics;40 and (c) the conservative tradition of religious-patriotic militarism.41 These
strands of tradition helped shape the Legionary worldview based on the idea of self-sacrificial patriotism with all its notions of heroic martyrdom, personal salvation, national
redemption, and vicarious atonement attained through death in a proximal sociocultural
35
Bucur, Heroes and Victims, p. 130.

Constituiunea, published in the Official Bulletin No. 282 of 29 March 1923. The Constitution was followed the next year by
the Law of Romanian Citizenship (O.B. No. 104 of 16 May 1924) that further consecrated the constitutional principle.
37
Codreanu, Pentru legionari, p. 127.
38
Ion I. Moa, Protocoalele nelepilor Sionului [The Protocols of the Elders of Zion] (Ortie: Libertatea, 1923).
39
The notion of Politische Theologie was first theorized in 1922 in Carl Schmitts theory of sovereignty, in which he argued
that All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, see Carl Schmitt,
Political Theology: Four Chapters in the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
2005), p. 36.
40
Mihai Stelian Rusu, Celebrating the Royal Liturgy within the National Calendrical MemoryThe Politics of Festive Time in
the Romanian Kingdom, 18661947, Journal of Comparative Anthropology and Sociology, 7:1 (2016), pp. 127159.
41
Iordachi, Gods Chosen Warriors, p. 316.
36
11
milieu defined by the following features: (a) wartime martialization of patriotism further
rendered in the aftermath of the Great War into a self-sacrificial ideology based on a politicized understanding of Christian-like heroic martyrdom. It is in the legacy of the war and
the militarization of society that it brought about that the roots of the political violence so
central to the Legions praxis are to be found, along with its paramilitazation and soldierlike discipline; (b) a political tradition of xenophobic nationalism out of which a violent
redemptive anti-Semitism emerged in the aftermath of the World War, enhanced by
the social conflict made salient in the multi-ethnic and pluri-confessional Greater
Romania;42 (c) a generational messianism43 coupled with what I will call a charismatic
juvenocracy striving towards a palingenetic new beginning attained through a spiritual
and sociopolitical revolution first emerged during the students revolt of the 1920s. Intimately connected to the redeeming anti-Semitism of the students movement, this salvationist complex espoused by the young generation was further entangled in a semiotic
network of political concepts with the fascist ideal of virile masculinity alongside the futuristic principle of vivere pericoloso; (d) a politicized ethnotheology under the form of
Orthodoxism that set the mystical ground for the Legions sacralization of politics.44 As
pointed out by Roland Clark, there was an elective affinity between the renascent mysticism in Romanian interwar Orthodox theology and the fascist movements emerging simultaneously. This further led to an entanglement between religion and politics and, by the
former sacralizing the latter, it set the ground for the Legions political theology to emerge;
(e) a culture of mourning emerged in the aftermath of the Great War during which the
heroization of wartime mass human sacrifices occurred.45 The post-war mourning
process where martial death was sacralized in the symbol of the Unknown Soldier constituted the cultural seedbed from which the Legions thanatic worldview would eventually
sprout. The Legions thanatic ultra-nationalism, with its cult of martyrs and celebration of
death, is evidently influenced by the mystical interwar ethnotheology, which accounts for
the Legions politics of the afterlife, its focus on the thereafter, and its conception of vicarious atonement through self-sacrificial death.
Political martyrdom, national redemption, and vicarious atonement: the

ethics of self-sacrificial patriotism
Drawing on the roots of Romanian nationalist tradition, the political ideology articulated
by the Legionary ultra-nationalist movement came to establish in the interwar period an
ethics of self-sacrificial patriotism, with political martyrdom as its categorical imperative.
The origins of the Legion are to be found in the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic student
42
Saul Friedlnder, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Volume I. The Years of Persecution, 19331939 (New York: HarperCollins,
1997). The notion of redemptive anti-Semitism was elaborated by Friedlnder to account for the Nazi hatred of
Jews. Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption
(p. 87). It expressed Hitlers crusade for racial purification of the Volk as well as his perceived mission to racially redeem
the world by eliminating the Jews. Without sharing the same racial trappings as its German counterpart, Romanian antiSemitism, fueled more by economic anxieties and social frustrations than racial considerations, was nonetheless redemptive, hoping to redeem the nation by eliminating the Jews from their privileged positions.
43
Iordachi, Charisma, Religion, and Ideology, p. 21.
44
Roland Clark, Nationalism, Ethnotheology, and Mysticism in Interwar Romania, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East
European Studies, 2002 (2009).
45
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
12
M. S. RUSU
activism culminating in the students general strike of 1922. With roots firmly entrenched
in the mid-nineteenth century, Romanian anti-Semitism reached a new milestone after the
making of Greater Romania, when European powers conditioned the recognition of the
new state by the granting of citizenship to the Jewish population. Going against the
grain of popular feeling, the Constitution of 1923 granted civil rights to the Jewish minority, unleashing a new wave of anti-Semitic hate throughout the country. Students in particular were infuriated by the fact that the Jews, although accounting for only 4% of the
population, made up 14.2% of student population.46 The politics of numerus clausus,
later spelled out as numerus valachicus, claiming the limitation of university students in
terms of ethnic quotas, was the expression of a rabid anti-Semitic ethnic patriotism.
With the creation of the Legion of the Archangel Michael on 24 June 1927, this antiSemitic patriotism that first animated the students soon assumed radical inflections, as
it was re-cast in the mystical frameworks underpinned by an ethics of self-sacrifice
endowed with redemptive virtues.
The Legions ideology buttressed itself, like all the other interwar fascisms sweeping
European societies, on a set of negatives, a central organizational feature, a doctrine of
leadership, and a basic structural goal.47 The fascist negations against which the ideology
of the Legion defined itself in apophatic fashion were an impressive string of antis: antimaterialism and anti-communism, anti-politicianism and anti-liberalism, anti-democratism and anti-parliamentarism, anti-Enlightenment thought and anti-bourgeois decadence,
anti-rationalism and, of course, anti-Semitism.48 Its central organizational feature resided
in a strictly disciplined party militia, endowed with full-fledged ceremonial theatricality
and military apparel, while its doctrine of leadership displayed a devotional respect for
hierarchy expressed through a mystical cult of the charismatic leader. The ultimate aim
to which the movement was striving was that of palingenesis, i.e. what Roger Griffin
defined as the quest for total re-birth, moral, social, cultural, and political.49 What
would emerge out of the Legionary revolution would be a heroic society that would
assert itself in the international political order and fulfill the great mission God had
endowed on the Romanian nation. Moreover, elaborating the politics of national salvation
into a political eschatology of redemption, the final aim of the Legionary revolution was
the Resurrection of the Nation.50 Or, as hailed by Mircea Eliade, Legionary revolution
has as its supreme aim: the redemption of the nation (mntuirea neamului), the reconciliation of the Romanian nation with God, as the Captain has asserted.51 Instrumental in
enacting such a spiritual revolution deemed to transfigure and purify Romanian society
was the goal of making the New Man, the product of an anthropological revolution
meant to restore the true, heroic, nature of Romanians corrupted by the bourgeois decadence of modern liberalism.
In his canonical texts that laid out the dogmatic foundations of the Legions political
theology of national salvation, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was abundantly clear on the
human dimension of the socio-moral revolution the Legion was set to unleash. Crticica
46
Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, p. 238.

Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 19141945 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 5.
48
Heinen, Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail; Veiga, Istoria Grzii de Fier.
49
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 32.
50
51
Dece cred n biruina micrii legionare. Rspunsul d-lui Mircea Eliade [Why I Believe in the Victory of the Legionary
Movement. The Answer of Mr. Mircea Eliade], Buna Vestire, I:244, 17 December 1937, p. 1.
47
13
efului de cuib, described by Constantin Iordachi as a pseudo-monastic Regula designed as

a guide to collective salvation through sacrifice, together with other writings by Ion
I. Moa and Alexandru Cantacuzino, were invested with the sacrosanct status of Scriptures
of the Iron Guards political religion.52 A basic theme recurrently emerging from these
texts is the concept of the new man. Codreanu was convinced that this country is
dying of lack of men, not of lack of programs. [] It is not programs that we need to
create, but men, new men.53 Creating the New Man as an outcome of a spiritual transfiguration was both fundamental (i.e. an aim in itself) and instrumental (i.e. a means to a
higher purpose) in building a strong and blooming Fatherland. [] For this Fatherland
we shall make from each Romanian a hero, ready to fight, ready to sacrifice, ready to
die.54 In the Legionary school of the creative deed, receiving his education in the nest,
in the labor camp, through long marches, disciplined hard work, prayer, meditation,
fasting, and an askesis of silence, a heroic personality would emerge that will revolutionize
the Romanian soul.55 From the Legionary school, a new man would come forth, a man
with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of
our Fatherland.56 Continuing to unwrap the threads of his prophetic vision, Codreanu
envisions a great type of Romanian, [] something great we never had before, which
could break in two our whole history, to lay the foundations for the beginning of a different Romanian history to which this people is entitled.57
The idea of the New Man was a crucial topos in the Legionary body of political writings.
The goal of creating a new type of human being was a driving force throughout the fascist
spectrum. The new phenotype of homo sapiens was conceived of by its political demiurgoi as a bio-nomic man meant to rejuvenate and redress the moral anomy of the modern,
decadent world.58 However, it was the Legionary project of political anthropogenesis that
drew heavily upon the Pauline doctrine of the New Man (Romans, 6:6; Ephesians, 2:15;
Ephesians, 4:2224; Colossians, 3:910). In the politicization of Pauls theological anthropology, the Legions violent conception of self-sacrificial patriotism comes to full view.
Within the Legions ideology of heroic martyrdom, the baptism of water seen as the symbolic rite of passage transforming the old Adamic man into the new, Christened man, was
reinterpreted into a baptism of blood crowned with the wrath of self-sacrifice. The latter
type of baptism was seen as a self-sacrificial test of fire, as a heroic means of bringing about
the new Legionary man epitomized in Codreanu, Moa and Marin, the Nicadors (the team
of three who assasinated prime minister Ion G. Duca in 1933), and the Decemvirs (the
commando of 10 who murdered their schismatic ex-fellow Mihail Stelescu on 16 July
1936).
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Crticica efului de cuib [The Nest Chiefs Booklet], 2nd ed. (sine loco, sine nomine, 1935), p. 55.
55
Valentin Sndulescu, Fascism and its Quest for the New Man: The Case of the Romanian Legionary Movement, Studia
Hebraica, 4 (2004), pp. 349361; Valentin Sndulescu, Taming the Spirit: Notes on the Shaping of the Legionary New
Man, in Traian Sandu (ed.) Vers un profil convergent des fascismes? Nouveau consensus et religion politique en Europe
centrale (Paris: LHarmattan, 2010), pp. 207216; Rebecca Haynes, Work Camps, Commerce, and the Education of the
New Man in the Romanian Legionary Movement, The Historical Journal, 51:4 (2008), pp. 943967.
56
57
Ibid.
58
Roger Griffin, Bio-nomic Man (and Woman): Fantasies of Anthropological Revolution as a Reaction to Modernitys Nomic
Crisis, in Marius Turda (ed.) Crafting Humans: From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond (Goettingen: V&R unipress, 2013),
pp. 7187, pp. 74, 72.
52
53
54
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M. S. RUSU
Further detailing the anthropological profile sketched by the Captain, Alexandru Cantacuzino spoke of the Romanian of tomorrow as a prophetic being, the dream of an
exceptional man.59 Carved out of dreams, the New Romanian will only emerge in
history after a painful and merciless surgery Romanians need to perform on their character and soul. [] What awaits us is a double work, one of healing and purging, another
one of creation.60 Beyond resurrecting all the virtues of the human soul, all the qualities
deep-seeded in our race such as ascetic heroism, sacrificial patriotism, and a vigorous
sense of the collective self, as Codreanu has envisioned the New Man, Cantacuzino
adds to his ideal profile two extra features: the New Man is to be violent as he will be extremist.61 Infusing him with the Legionary style, the Legion will renovate the very nature of
the Romanian man. In the aftermath of the Legionary anthropological revolution, the
current Romanian man will be freed from the prison of the biological to be released
into the realm of the spiritual.62 Incidentally, it is difficult to miss the immanent contradiction lying at the heart of the Legions political program of making the New Romanian.
In the Legionary imaginary, the New man is simultaneously an anthropological project of
the future to be bred in the school of heroic education and a thing of the pastthe true,
genuine, Christian Romanian corrupted by time and modernity. It is not towards the Old
Romanian that the Legion is rebelling against, but the Romanian of today, the current man
of the here and now. By a Michelangelonian technique, the timeless Old-New Romanian
would have to be carved out from his imprisonment in the marble block of history, where
his ideal essence is to be found.
This new breed of heroic Romanian, educated in the Legionary school of the heroic
deed, chiseled in sweat and prayer, was to espouse an absolute willingness to patriotic
self-sacrifice, a zealous readiness to die for the movements supreme cause, that of redeeming the nation before history and God. Supreme self-sacrifice lies at the very core of the
Legionary political ideology and general worldview. The Legionary literaturewhether
canonical writing of the movements leadership such as Codreanus booklets or the bursting Legionary periodicalsis suffused with exaltations of violence and exhortations to
martyrdom. Reminiscing the disquieting words of Sergey Nechayev, who in his Catechism
of a Revolutionary has described the revolutionary as a doomed man, Codreanu addresses
to his Legionnaires in an appallingly similar fashion:
LEGIONNAIRES, [] I think of you as I write. Of you who will have to die, receiving the
baptism of death with the serenity of our ancestral Thracians. And of you, those who will
have to step over the dead and their tombs, carrying in your hands the victorious banners
of the Romanians.63
Although situating themselves at opposing ends of the political spectrum, Romanian fascists and Russian nihilists met in the terrorist means they were willing to employ in pursuing their revolutionary goals. Most probably, due to his frugal education Codreanu
might never have read the explosive texts of the nihilist literature that burst in Imperial
Russia in the second part of the nineteenth century. Some of his comrades, however,
59
Alexandru Cantacuzino, Romnul de mine. Romnismul nostru [The Romanian of Tomorrow. Our Romanianism] (Bucureti: Tiparul Romnesc, 1937), p. 9.
Ibid., p. 12.
61
Ibid., p. 15.
62
Ernest Bernea, Stil legionar [Legionary Style]. Colecia Omul Nou (1937; sine loco, sine nomine, 1953), pp. 1617.
63
Codreanu, Pentru legionari, p. 6, capital letters in original.
60
15
such as Ion I. Moa and Vasile Marin (not to mention the sophisticated intellectuals
making up the Axa group), were certainly more familiar to European political thought
and philosophical ideas, since Nietzsche and Spengler are oft-cited names in their writings.64 In spite of the lack of any direct inuence between the two radically different sociopolitical movements, their common insistence on the self-sacricial nature of the political
engagement, the doomed condition of the revolutionary, and the philosophy of the
bomb is quite staggering.65
The Legion of the Archangel Michael emerged as a charismatic movement based on a
generational messianism propelled by a redemptive anti-Semitism and violent anti-communism. However, as it matured from anti-communist shock brigades made up of youth
thugs later reorganized into an essentially student anti-Semitic movement into a nationwide sociopolitical phenomenon, the Legion developed its own ideological profile blending a fascist strive towards a new order with a Christian theology of martyrdom. What has
resulted from this combination was an explosive redemptive political theology thoroughly
pervaded by the notions of martyrdom, personal salvation, and collective atonement. It
was in the light of these concepts that the understanding of patriotism was transformed
in the Legionary thought into a doctrine of self-sacrificial heroism.
In a seminal study, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has singled out the redemption theology
underpinning the fascist palingenetic strive towards establishing a new sociopolitical and
moral order.66 A redemptive hope was constitutive of fascisms historical outlook and it
could be mentioned among the demarcating features of fascism in comparison to other
teleologically driven political movements. The redemptive mindset was a basic state of
mind shared by all varieties of fascism. Redemption theology presupposes a narrative template based on (1) the myth of an ideal past set against (3) a deficient present. Between the
two antithetical states, (2) an event or a stream of events are made responsible for degenerating the ideal past into an undesired present, i.e. a sin or a collection of sins. The situation requires (4) an act of redemption as a ransom for these sins designed to restore the
idealized past in the present. This redemptive act is conceived of as the self-sacrificial
means of actualizing (5) the idealized state of the past into the hic et nunc of the
present. What particularizes the Legions redemptive mindset within the fascist spectrum
is its certainty that it is only through the means of martyric self-sacrifice, understood in
terms of a political theology as a ransom of the historical sins of the nation, redemption
could ever occur. This redemption scenario at the core of the Legions political theology is
indicative of fascist temporality in general and of the Legions sense of time in particular.
Vasile Marin, Crez de generaie: Ideologia faptei [The Creed of a Generation: The Ideology of the Deed] in Crez de generaie, 2nd ed., pp. 187189; Note [Notes] in Crez de generaie, 2nd ed., pp. 4554; Stat i cultur [State and Culture] in
Crez de generaie, 2nd ed., pp. 149158 (Bucureti: Tipografia Bucovina, 1937). Marins familiarity with the intellectual
milieu of the fascist thought is proved in his PhD thesis published as Fascismul: organizarea constituional a statului corporativ italian (Fascism: The Constitutional Organization of the Italian Corporative State) (sine loco: Editura Colportajului
Legionar, 1932). Marin also kept a correspondence with the leader of the Action Franaise, Charles Maurras (see Cher
matre in in Crez de generaie, pp. 93100). Besides Nietzsche and Maurras, another influence was that of Oswald Spengler, whose funerary apocaliptics resonates with the pessimism of Nietzsche and Chamberlain, see Nicolae Rou, Dialectica naionalismului [The Dialectic of Nationalism] (Bucureti: Cultura Naional, 1936), p. 111. However, save the
few intellectuals of the movement who were familiar with Nietzsches works, it is safe to assume that the great majority
of the Legionnaires came under the spell of a Nietzschean vulgate as professed by Codreanus doctrine of the deed.
65
Heinen, Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail, p. 114 has pointed out that as all terrorists do, Ion I. Moa and Codreanu embraced
the philosophy of the bomb.
66
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, I redentori della vittoria: On Fiumes Place in the Genealogy of Fascism, Journal of Contemporary
History, 31:2 (1996), pp. 253272, p. 256.
64
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M. S. RUSU
As shown by Raul Crstocea, the Legion developed an hourglass conception of temporality, a vision in which a timeless Romanian nation spanning both an immemorial past
and an indefinite future was made salient in an urgent present, interpreted as a threshold
between two worlds.67 It is only through an act of heroic martyrdom that the present
could break the teeth of time and escape the terror of history into a glorious future
made present by actualizing the glorious past. Besides a peculiar fascist temporality, the
Legions redemptive political theology is also underpinned by an apocalyptic mindset.
Drawing on Eugen Webers analysis of the apocalyptic content of modern secular revolutionary movements, Rebecca Haynes has argued that The Revelation of John in particular
provided the Legionnaires with an interpretive framework into which to cast their own
visions of apocalypse, soteriology, and salvationist hopes.68 This apocalyptic strand of
thought surfaced recurrently in framing the events to which the Legionnaires were
taking part to in terms of a cosmic battle between the forces of evil and the archangelic
army of Gods chosen ones.
Time and again, martyrdom was heralded as the paramount virtue of Legionary patriotism. The acts of redemption meant to redress the deficiencies of the present and to resurrect the nation were conceived of as martyric acts of voluntary self-sacrifice. In fact,
fascistizing the Orthodox doctrine, the Legions ideologues elaborated political martyrdom
into the eight sacrament of the movements political theology of national redemption and
the cornerstone of the Legionary conception of patriotism.69 The rhetoric of heroic martyrdom and self-sacrificial patriotism gained such importance in the movements worldview and political identity that it shaped the Legion as a charismatic community of
sacrifice driven by what I will call as the ideology of thanatic ultra-nationalism.70 By
this term I designate a radical ideology of integral nationalism celebrating self-sacrificial
death for its fructifying benefits and claiming from the part of their adherents the willingness to undergo political martyrdom for the movements superior cause (i.e. the final
redemption of the entire nation).71
We believe in the redemptive virtue of tombs, sounds the confession of faith made by
Alexandru Cantacuzino, before joining the Legionary commando that will fight on the
Spanish front.72 Sharing the same generational creed of redemptive martyrdom as his
comrade Cantacuzino, together with Vasile Marin, Ion Moa would live up (or should
one say die up?) to his words, Sacrifice is the measure of our Christianity, in welcoming
violent death in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.73 Revealing once again the palingenetic
thrust of the Legionary ideology, Moa went on saying that we were the ones who
brought the heroic urging, IN THE SPIRIT OF COMPLETE PERSONAL SACRIFICE,
Raul Crstocea, Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the Terror of History in the Rhetoric of the Legionary
Movement in Interwar Romania, The Journal of Modern European History, 13:1 (2015), pp. 7997, p. 84.
Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Rebecca Haynes, The Romanian Legionary Movement. Popular Orthodoxy and the Cult of Death, in Mioara
Anton, Florin Anghel, and Cosmin Popa (eds) Hegemoniile trecutului. Evoluii romneti i europene (Bucureti: Curtea
Veche, 2006), pp. 113125, p. 115.
69
Ionu Florin Biliu, The Archangels Consecrated Servants. An Inquiry in the Relationship between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Iron Guard (19301941) (PhD thesis, Central European University, Budapest, 2013), p. 32.
70
71
Mircea Eliade, sine nomine, Buna Vestire, II:262, 14 January 1938, p. 4. Still under the spell of Moa and Marins sacrifice,
Eliade concluded that This death has borne fruit. The two martyrs did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives in order to
hasten the redemption of the entire nation.
72
Alexandru Cantacuzino, Romnismul nostru [Our Romanianism] (Bucureti: Tipografia I.N. Copuzeanu, 1936), p. 7.
73
Vasile Marin, Crez de generaie [Creed of a Generation] (Bucureti: Tipografia Bucovina I.E. Torouiu, 1937).
67
68
17
against this old and alienated world.74 Plunging further into the realm of a tantalizing
mystique of death, Moa was convinced of the victory of the movement, now than we
have at our disposal the most formidable dynamite, the most resistant fighting instrument,
stronger than tanks and machine-guns: it is our own ashes.75 In similar thanatic fashion,
Vasile Marin established as the first article of faith defining the creed of his generation that
the self-sacrificing spirit is essential.76 Ion Moa and Vasile Marin will die in the battle at
Majadahonda, fighting in the civil war along the Spanish Nationalists against the Republican communists. They sought redemption in death, for themselves and the nation they
were representing, by what they conceived of as fighting in a holy war on Gods side. Their
dead bodies, teeming nevertheless with political life, were sacralized by the Legion as political reliquiae, as they were carried around in a mortuary train throughout Europe and the
entire country to be publically displayed and revered in theatrically performed political
liturgies.77 Their bodies were laid to rest in a mausoleum especially built to receive the
martyrs corpses, erected near the Headquarters of the Legion in Bucharest. The mausoleum soon became a shrine of national memory and a major destination of pilgrimages for
the members and supporters of the Legionary movement. After the mausoleum was struck
by a lightning bolt causing the wooden canopy to burn, save the cross, it was also hailed as
a site of miracles.78
Adding another explicit dimension to the religious framing of their death as sacred
martyrdom, a fellow comrade of Moa and Marin in the Spanish campaign has described
the two as being crucified in the war against the Bolshevik Satan.79 In a similar hermeneutical vein, drawing on the martyr motif of the via crucis, Ion Dumitrescu-Bora, the
orthodox priest who also joined the Legionary expedition to Spain, designated their voluntary death for Christ and the Cross as the greatest Legionary sacrifice.80 Despite their
rather ambivalent attitude toward the Legion, the Orthodox Churchs higher clergy
finally surrendered their doubts in the face of Moa and Marins self-sacrificial death.
With many of its lower priests entangled in the Legionary movement (which also included
in its ranks numerous theology students), hierarchs of the Orthodox Church were now
keen to employ their sacerdotal power not only to sacralize their death as triple martyrs
(Christian, National, and Legionary), but also in establishing their deed as the paramount
example of patriotism.81 A specimen in this regard are the words of the vicar bishop of the
Mitropoly of Transylvania. In his discourse held during the funerary ceremony organized
while the mortuary train transporting the bodies of Moa and Marin stopped in Sibiu, the
hierarch had addressed the dead by saying to them: In sacrificing your youthful lives to
Christ and the Nation, you bequeathed upon us as testament and legacy the example of
Ion I. Moa, Garda de Fier i L. A. N. C. [Iron Guard and L. A. N. C.], Axa. Publicaie bilunar, politic, artistic i literar, I:19,
1 October 1933, pp. 12, capital letters in original.
Moa, Esenialul [The Essential] in Cranii de lemn, pp. 173175, p. 174.
76
Marin, Ce este politica naionalist [What is Nationalist Politics] in Crez de generaie (Wooden Skulls: Articles 19221936)
(Sibiu: Editura Totul pentru ar, 1936), pp. 3944, p. 39; Moa, Esenialul, p. 174.
77
Sndulescu, Sacralised Politics in Action, pp. 259269.
78
Minunea dela mormntul mucenicilor Ion Moa i Vasile Marin [The Miracle from the Tomb of the Martyrs Ion Moa and
Vasile Marin], Lumina Satelor, XVI:26, 27 June 1937, p. 3.
79
Bnic Dobre, Crucificaii: Zile trite pe frontul spaniol [The Crucified: Days Lived on the Spanish Front] (Bucureti: Tipografia I. N. Copuzeanu, 1937).
80
Ion Dumitrescu-Bora, Cea mai mare jertf legionar [The Greatest Legionary Sacrifice] (Sibiu: Editura Totul pentru ar,
1937).
81
D. S. [Dumitru Stniloae], Martiri pentru Hristos [Martyrs for Christ], Telegraful Romn, LXXXV:4, 24 January 1937, p. 2;
Traian Brileanu, Mntuire prin jertf (Redemption through Martyrdom), Buna Vestire, II:262, 14 January 1938, p. 4.
74
75
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M. S. RUSU
the foremost sublime, the sole and true patriotism.82 The metropolitan bishop himself,
Nicolae Blan, who headed the funeral in Bucharest, echoed in his sermon the Biblical
parable of the grain of wheat (John, 12:2426), praying to God for allowing the martyrdom of your servants Ioan and Vasile to bear fruit on the land of our country.83
The Spanish Civil War was being for them the cosmic battleground in which Satan was
attacking God for world spiritual supremacy. At war were the genius of Evil set out to
wipe off the face of the earth the symbolic icon of Divinity against the fierce tenacity of
Christs martyrs.84 Consequently, at stakes was not only the fate of Spain, but the soul
of the world: This Holy War is not just Spains, it is everyones and thus it is ours too.
[] If Spain will live and it will live, we will live as well, and if Spain will die but she
will not die, we will die too.85 Nationalist Spain will live on, but Moa and Marin died
defending her. Nevertheless, within the Legionary worldview, their physical deaths
granted them symbolic immortality as Christian and Legionary martyrs to be forever worshiped in the national memory. Their acts of heroic martyrdom were set as a supreme
example of Legionary self-sacrifice, deemed to inspire similar actions of martyric patriotism. An outburst of obituaries and memorial writings glorifying their supreme heroism
flooded the country, amounting to a full-fledged martyrology.86 Deliberately blurring
the boundaries between military death driven by political commitment and religious martyrdom propelled by Christian faith, Moa and Marins violent deaths were sacralized as
Legionary acts of martyrdom. Their voluntary deaths were conceived of as a ransom
for the sins of the nation. Talking about Moa, the most zelotic of the two, Alexandru Cantacuzino, their comrade-in-arms on the Spanish front, said that He obstinately wanted to
give an example of martyrdom. It was his deliberate will to die as a soldier of Christianity
to ransom all the curses that were thrown over our nation.87
It is an argument put forward in this paper that Moa and Marins burial had drawn on
two sources of inspiration in transforming the funerals into a powerful means of political
propaganda. First, Legionnaires found inspiration from an immediate, exogenous source,
i.e. the 12 February 1936 state funerals of Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi leader of Switzerland,
assassinated in his home in Davos. The coffin containing his body was transported to his
birthplace in the town of Schwerin, with a special funerary train that stopped in major
cities as it crossed Germany south to north. Hitler himself delivered the eulogy, while
Cuvntarea P. S. Sale Vasile, vicarul Mitropoliei Ardealului, cu ocaziunea trecerii prin gara Sibiului a trenului funebru cu
osmintele legionarilor Ion Moa i Vasile Marin, Lumina Satelor, XVI:9, 28 February 1937, p. 3.
83
Nicolae Blan, F Doamne s rodeasc jertfa robilor ti Ioan i Vasile, pe pmntul rii noastre Lumina Satelor, XVI:8,
21 February 1937, p. 1. However, the Patriarch Miron Cristea along with other segments of the higher clergy of the Romanian Orthodox Church did not openly support either the instant martyrdom of the two Legionary commanders or the
movement in general. This is indicative of the intricate, often ambivalent, and sometimes conflictual relationships
between the Legions violent archangelic nationalism and BORs conservative authoritarianism.
84
Dobre, Crucificaii, pp. 2425.
85
Ibid., p. 5. The discourse was given by General Gheorghe Zizi Cantacuzino, the leader of the Legionary commando in
Spain.
86
See, for instance, the festive number of the newspaper Cuvntul Studenesc [The Student Voice], JanuaryFebruary 1937,
XII (14), dedicated to celebrating the death of the two martyr-heroes. Among other panegyrics and encomia, the one
written by the Orthodox Priest N.T. Georgescu-Edinei, the students spiritual confessor, declared them as Heroes of the
Cross, Martyrs of the Nation. In the same vein, the Legionary poet Valeriu Crdu published a volume bearing the title
Cuiburi de luminVersuriReculegere. nchinare. Cinstire. LegmntPentru Sfnta Jertf a marilor comandani ai
nvierii: Ion I. Moa i Vasile Marin [Nests of LightPoemsRecollectedness. Veneration. Reverence. CovenantFor
the Sacred Martyrdom of the Great Commanders of the Resurrection: Ion I. Moa and Vasile Marin]. Ediie de Exil [Exil
Edition] (1937; Madrid: Editura Carpaii, 1958).
87
Alexandru Cantacuzino, Pentru Christos [For Christ]. Colecia Omul Nou (1937; sine loco, sine nomine, 1952), p. 7.
82
19
other Nazi dignitaries honored their fallen martyr with their presence.88 A second, distal
but endogenous, source of inspiration was provided by the 1923 reburial of the Romanian
Unknown Soldier. After a coffin was randomly selected from the 10 containing unidentified remains of Romanian soldiers of Orthodox faith, it traveled in a funerary train that
stopped at every station from Mreti to its final burial place in Bucharest. Patterning
the burial of Moa and Marin on the two models, I argue that a double fixation of the
Legions political culture was thus achieved. Firstly, on a horizontal level, a fascist synchronization with the Nazi political cult of the fallen was made (through a Nazi burial
mimesis). Secondly, on a vertical level, a historical communion with the Romanian
heroic and martyrological tradition symbolized in the Unknown Soldier was established
through an act of reburial re-enactment. Although it had drawn heavily on the political
martial liturgy performed at the reburial of the Unknown Soldier in staging the funerals
of Moa and Marin, the Legions necropolitics departed from its 1923 model in significant
ways which shed light upon its peculiar redemptive political theology. As it was the case in
February 1937, the ceremony observed with the reburial of the Unknown Soldier was filled
with religious meanings. The language of sacrifice and redemption was employed to make
sense of the war dead. The monument erected to honor the Unknown Soldier was meant
to symbolize the national redemption achieved through the sacrification of the 350,000
fallen soldiers on whose bones rests the soil of the Greater Romania, as it is inscribed
on the epitaph. The collective death of the fallen soldiers to which the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier was erected was interpreted as a supreme material sacrifice, as a
bodily martyrdom for the purpose of politically redeeming the nation (i.e. its territorial
integrity, its independence, and its sovereignty). However, it also included powerful symbolic and religious elements. The unburied remains were ritually washed in an ectenie de
oase liturgical ceremony, by which the bones were sacralized and turned into relics. Religious meanings were also made salient through the scheduling of the ceremony to occur
on the Ascension Day, celebrated 40 days after the Day of the Resurrection. That the ceremony was held on the Day of the Ascension was meant to symbolize that the fallen gained
(1) personal salvation and thus eternal life in Christ but also (2) memorial afterlife in the
nations collective memory.
In Moa and Marins funeral, the concept of national redemption underpinning the
political martial liturgy performed at the reburial of the Unknown Soldier is further escalated to reach vicarious atonement, i.e. the redemption of the nations sins through their
deaths. Moa and Marins self-sacrificial death not only redeemed the nation from her
physical dangers, as the fallen during the Great War have done, but also ransomed her
moral sins in front of history and God, an idea that was not present in the politico-theological semantics surrounding the Unknown Soldier. I thus contend that a swift shift had
occurred in between the two funeral ceremonies, which is indicative of the Legions particular political theology. It consists in a shift from national redemption and collective
soteriology visible in the reburial of the Unknown Soldier to vicarious atonement and
expiation of sins through self-sacrificial heroic acts designed to ransom the sins of the
nation.
The religious aura seeping through the Legionary notion of political martyrdom is particularly conspicuous. The Legionary doctrine of sacrificial patriotism, as the Iron Guards
George L. Mosse, Fascism and the French Revolution, Journal of Contemporary History, 24:1 (1989), pp. 526, pp. 1718.
88
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M. S. RUSU
entire ideology and worldview, drew heavily on the Christian ethos of martyrdom, which it
managed to bastardize into a thoroughly politicized feat of dying for the nation. Due to the
intimate fusion with the religious ideology of Orthodoxism, Romanian Legionarism is a
prime example of what Dorothee Slle has called Christofascism.89 Legionary Christofascism and the movements redemptive political theology were the result of a chiastic interpolation between politics and religion. Starting with the fin-de-19th-sicle, Orthodox
clergymen made the step into the field of politics, thus politicizing the sacred. Simultaneously, Romanian nationalism joined forces with dynastic royalism in sacralizing the
politics, a process which culminated in the Legionary fascistization of transcendence as
expressed by I. P. Prundenis assertion that God is a fascist!90 This politicization of the
sacred concomitant with the sacralization of politics is thus indicative of a chiastic interpolation between politics and religion that would ultimately lead to the articulation of the
Legions peculiar political theology of national redemption.
Following the by now classical interpretation advanced by Emilio Gentile, fascism in
general and the Iron Guard in particular resorted to the sacralization of politics.91 If
Italian Fascismo and German Nationalsozialismus excelled at what Walter Benjamin
has called as the aestheticization of politics, Romanian Legionarism exceeded itself and
other brands of interwar fascisms in sacralizing politics, violence, and martyric death.92
Present within the Legionary idea of political martyrdom is the concept of existential
transvaluation, which also stood at the basis of the understanding of religious martyrdom
in the first centuries of Christianity. Appropriating the martyric drive into death espoused
by the first Christians, the political philosophy developed by the Iron Guard incorporated
the transvaluation of reality, i.e. transforming life into death and vice versa, transfigurating
death into life. Legionnaires do not die, asserted Codreanu. Erect, immovable, invincible
and immortal, they look forever victorious over the impotent convulsions of hatred.93
Romanian Legionnaires adopted the fascist ritual of shouting Present! when the name
of a dead was called. This fascist dialogue with the dead was enacted on 13 February
1937, at the funerals of Moa and Marin, when the Legionary crowd responded with
Present! to the roll call of the martyrs names. Foreshadowing his own death, Ion
Moa actively contributed to his symbolic construction of political martyrdom by
writing one of his last articles while on the Spanish front bearing the title Present!94
Emilio Gentile was among the scholars to notice that the fascists compared themselves
to the first Christians, who spread the word amongst the pagans, ready to brave martyrdom for the triumph of the new faith.95 Just as Christian martyrs of the Early Church were
receiving the agony of torture resulting in death from their Roman persecutors as the
89
Dorothee Slle, Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing
House, 1970).
I. P. Prundeni, Dumnezeu e fascist! [God is a fascist!], Porunca Vremii, VI:801, 20 July 1937, p. 1.
91
Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
92
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Harry Zohn (trans.), Hannah Arendt (ed.)
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217252; Roger Griffin has asserted that in terms of the eagerness
of devotion to the charismatic leader and the intensity of the death cult, the Legion was unparalleled in other fascist
movements, except, perhaps, among the most fanatical paramilitary supporters of Hitler and Jos Antonio, see
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 139.
93
94
Ion Moa, Prezent!: [articole, scrisori] [Present! Articles, Letters] (Bucureti: Tipografia Bucovina I. E. Torouiu, 1937).
95
Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport and London: Praeger, 2003),
p. 113.
90
21
gateway to heavens, Legionnaires were similarly searching salvation through death. It is

this Christic mysticism of self-sacrifice, expressed through a martyric ecstasy and an
unmatched cult of death that singled out Legionarism within the interwar European
fascist spectrum. Although a Legions trademark, this was by no way unique to Romanian
fascism. Other strands of fascist movements had also developed an elaborate cult of the
dead along with ideas of resurrection and immortality, from the Spanish motto Viva
la Muerte! to the Croatian Ustaas fantasies of annihilation as well as of collective
redemption. What made the Legion stand out from among its fascists counterparts was
its mystical outset imbued with Orthodoxist precepts regarding the sanctity of martyric
death modeled after the deeds of the first Christians.96 That the Legionnaires also took
the saluto romano (the salute of the Christians persecutors) adds to the contradictory
nature of Iron Guards symbolics.
At the centerpiece of the Legions political theology of national redemption stood the
cult of death. Rebecca Haynes has made the point that the necrophilic mindset from
the core of the Legions worldview has its roots in Romanian popular orthodoxy, which
the movement has tapped and incorporated into its own ideology of thanatic ultra-nationalism.97 But it has also drawn heavily on the Christian theology of death and martyrdom,
which its doctrinaires succeeded in sacralizing them within the Legions redemptive political theology. Profoundly impressed by the collective pledge taken by the Legionnaires in
front of the coffins of Moa and Marin, where they swore to stand ready to die at any time
for the Resurrection of my Nation, Mircea Eliade wrote that the Redemption of the
Nation is not possible without self-sacrifice; no Resurrection is possible without death,
even less so the collective resurrection of the Romanian nation.98 The necessity of voluntary death found its paramount expression in Dan Bottas pro mori exhortation, For the
Cult of the Dead, ending with the exclamation: We shall learn to die!99 The worship of
death was fused with the cult of the fallen martyrs within the Legions ideology of heroic
martyrdom and later organizationally institutionalized in the Moa-Marin Corps, established on 13 January 1938 under the leadership of Alexandru Cantacuzino.100 Also hailed
as the Battalion of Death, it was designed as an elite corps created to honor the memory of
the two fallen commanders on the Spanish front on 13 January 1937. It was also meant to
institutionalize within the movement the exemplary self-sacrificial death of the two. The
corps was demographically limited to 10,033 youths, all of them under 30 years of age, who
were willing to fully embrace the Moa-Marin pledge of the supreme self-sacrifice, together
with a highly demanding ascetic ethos requiring black fasting three days a week, permanent prayer, and celibacy.101
Mark Neocleous, Long Live Death! Fascism, Resurrection, Immortality, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10:1 (2005), pp. 31
49, p. 40; Rory Yeomans, Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941
1945, Central Europe, 10:2 (2005), pp. 234256.
97
Haynes, The Romanian Legionary Movement, pp. 113125.
98
Mircea Eliade, Comentarii la un jurmnt [Comments at a Pledge], Vremea, IX:476, 21 February 1937, p. 2.
99
Dan Botta, Pentru cultul morilor, Sfarm-Piatr, II:27, 28 May 1936, p. 5.
100
Drago Protopopescu, Ordinul Moa-Marin, Buna Vestire, II:272, 27 January 1938, p. 1.
101
O nou unitate legionar n cadrul partidului Totul pentru ar, Buna Vestire. Ziar liber de lupt i doctrin romneasc,
II:270, 23 January 1938, p. 8; ndreptarul Corpului Legionar Moa-Marin, the Moa-Marin Corps guide book, specified that
the new elite unit will consist of 13 brigades of 771 members each, led by a General Staff constituted by the Commander
of the Corps and 9 additional fighters. All this arithmetics was symbolic in nature, since the two Legionnaires after whom
the Corps was being named died on 13.01.1937; 13 January was also proclaimed as the sacred holyday of the MoaMarin Legionary Corps; Julius Evola, Legionarismo ascetico. Colloquio col capo delle Guardie di Ferro, Il Regime
96
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M. S. RUSU
Despite incarnating its political ideology on the spiritual backbone of Eastern creed, the
Legionary Orthodoxism was nevertheless highly unorthodox in its sacralization of politics. As pointed out by Radu Ioanid, in spite of its blatantly displayed Orthodox paraphernalia, fascist Legionary mysticism attempted at subordinating and transforming that
theology into a political instrument in a way that made it the enemy of genuine Christian
values and spirituality.102 Indeed, the New Romanian patriot nurtured in the Legionary
values of martyric heroism was to espouse the Nietzschean philosophy of vitalism hybridized with a muscular and exclusivistic understanding of Christianity as the love of the
national neighbor and the hate of the national other. Although the Legion defined itself in
Christian termsfrom its origin in a carceral revelation, to its archangelic name and its
religious mission to redeem the Romanian nationit was not the Jesus of love, mercy,
and forgiveness that the Legionnaires were following, but the Jesus of the sword, war,
and revenge (Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send
peace, but a sword, Matthew 10:34). The Legionary brand of Christianity was a doctrine
of political violence, infused with testosterone, masculinity, and martial heroism.
Thoroughly suffused with Orthodox spirituality, the ideologues of the Legion were nevertheless longing feverishly for a Romania in delirium, impatiently yearning for a nationalist Romania, a delirious and chauvinistic Romania, armed and vigorous, pitiless and
vengeful.103
Blending Christian forgiveness with the ethos of martial mercilessness, Codreanu
himself urged his followers to pardon the ones who wronged them. Forgive those
who struck you for personal reasons. But be ruthless towards those who wronged the
nation. Political revenge instead of Christian forgiving is called for the enemies of the
nation, who must be punished in exemplary fashion: unforgiving and unmerciful.104
Alexandru Cantacuzino saw no opposition in proclaiming that the Romanian of tomorrow will be a good Christian, more faithful and more observing than the Romanian of
today, next to saying that the Romanian of tomorrow will have two qualities: he will be
grateful and he will be revengeful. Remember, gentlemen, he will be merciless.105 This
paradoxical and quite contradictory doctrine of Nietzschean Christianity promoted
within Legionary ideology was to give birth to the bermensch Orthodox Romanian
ready and eager to give his life for the superior cause of his nation, such as Moa
and Marin.106 Or, when the time calls it, to sacrifice themselves to life in prison by sacrificing others to death, such as was the case with the Decemvirsa death commando of
Fascista, 13, 22 March 1938, reprinted in Julius Evola, Naionalism i ascez. Reflecii asupra fenomenului legionar (Alba
Iulia: Fronde, 1998).
Ioanid, The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard, p. 419.
103
Emil Cioran, Schimbarea la fa a Romniei [The Transfiguration of Romania] (Bucureti: Vremea, 1936), p. 88; Although
not a commited member of the movement and despite his unorthodox beliefs expressed in the aforementioned book
(received with unease by Codreanu), Cioran was a sympathetic fellow traveler of the movement who arduously shared
from the same ideals undepinning the Legionary ideology. His fascination and awe towards Codreanu was voiced in a
radio conference broadcasted on 27 November 1940, when he compared Codreanu to Jesus and ended his talk by hailing
the Captain as a deadman who spread a perfume of eternity over our dung and brought back the sky over Romania. The
transcript was published on the Christmas Day as Profilul interior al Cpitanului [The Captains Inner Profile] Glasul Strmoesc, VI:10, 25 December 1940, p. 5; Mircea Eliade, Elogiu Transilvaniei, Vremea, IX:465, 29 November 1936, p. 2.
104
105
Cantacuzino, Romnul de mine, p. 29.
106
My view of Legionarism as professing a muscular Christian Orthodoxy was inspired by Samuel Todd Presner, Muscular
Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); the notion of bermensch, after
which the Fascist anthropological ideal of the New Man was patterned, is discussed in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1883; London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1961).
102
23
10 Legionnaireswho on 16 July 1936 shot and chopped the dead body of their former
comrade, Mihail Stelescu, accused of treason.107 Not only did they show no sign of
remorse in the aftermath of their savage act of political violenceafter killing Stelescu
who was recovering in the hospital bed after an appendectomy, the Decemvirs initiated a
macabre dance around the deceaseds butchered bodybut at their trial in May 1937,
they even made reference to the Christian principles of love and forgiveness.108
Seduced by Nietzsches Macht-Philosophie, the Legionary ideologists were at pains to
reconcile it with the Orthodox faith.109 The same Alexandru Cantacuzino, a prominent
leader of the movement, had managed to defuse the essential tension between the two
opposing principles, in asserting that our nationalism will accept nothing but the superman and the super-nation elected and marked by the grace of God, and only for the
purposes of redemption and salvation.110 Moa and Marins heroic martyrdom on
the Spanish front washed in blood some of the countrys historic sins. The Decemviri
who punished the schismatic Stelescu, accused of having planned a plot to assassinate
Codreanu, were glorified in the Legions exuberant press for having redeemed the
Romanian nation of the curse of treason that curbed in the past the countrys path
towards achieving its glorious destiny.111 Filtered through the interpretive scheme of
vicarious atonement, their murder was conceived of as a necessary self-sacrificial ransoming of Romanian nation, now purged of its historic curse of treason. Butchering Stelescu, the personification of treason, the 10 Legionnaires killed the principle and the
consequences of treason in the Romanian history, they would claim boasting of their
murderous act.112 The same rhetoric of cleansing treason through a violent act of
redemption had been employed when Ion I. Moa unloaded eight bullets in his fellow
student conspirator, Aurelian Vernichescu, for punishing his alleged betrayal.113 The
assassinations committed by the other notorious death teamsthe Nicadors who murdered the prime minister Ion G. Duca on 30 December 1933 and the Avengers who
revenged Codreanus death by killing another prime minister, Armand Clinescu, on
21 September 1939were shrouded in the same tropes of martyrdom, self-sacrifice,
divine justice, and political redemption.
Conclusions: the self-sacrificial dimension of patriotism

This study has examined the fascistization of patriotism under the Romanian Iron Guards
political theology of national redemption. It argued that within the political theology
underpinned by an ideology of thanatic ultra-nationalism, a self-sacrificial understanding
of patriotism emerged in the Legionary movement. In this mystical mindset, dying for the
Fatherland, the Legion, and the Nation was seen as a sacred political martyrdom that
Mihail Stelescu a fost asasinat [Mihail Stelescu has been Assassinated ], Cruciada Romnismului. Sptmnal de
lupt politic i spiritual, II:81, 19 July 1936, pp. 12.
108
Crstocea, Breaking the Teeth of Time, p. 79.
109
On Macht-Philosophie, see Marin, Crez de generaie, pp. 187189, who hails the Nietzschean principle of existence
expressed in an unyielding will to power.
110
Alexandru Cantacuzino, Romnismul nostru [Our Romanianism] (Bucureti: Tipografia I.N. Copuzeanu, 1936), p. 10.
111
V. B. Gorle, Impresii dela procesul celor 10 [Impressions from the Trial of the 10], Braul de Fier, III:20, May 1937, pp. 34,
p. 4.
112
Ibid.
113
Atentatul din nchisoarea Vcreti. Studentul arestat Ion Moa, trage opt focuri de revolver asupra studentului Vernichescu chemat la Vcreti, Adevrul, XXXVII:12323, 29 March 1924, p. 4.
107
24
M. S. RUSU
brought personal salvation to the self-sacrificer along with the ransoming of the nations
sins as a necessary condition of her final redemption. Stimulated by continuous harassment by the state authorities, the Legion developed a political theology of redemption
coupled with a political theodicy of suffering whose cornerstone rested on the idea of martyrdom, by which self-sacrificial death was sacralized as a hollowed means of redeeming
the nation.
Its radical formula of integral nationalism imbued with such religious meanings was
grounded on a nationalist ethos in which dying for the nation (i.e. self-sacrificial patriotism) was glorified as the ultimate value. Moreover, in its most radical rendering, the
Legions thanatic ultra-nationalism required as the supreme moral duty from the part
of every national to die readily for the nation, as expressed in the Moa-Marin pledge.
At the core of this ideology lay a frantic cult of death, transvaluated through martyric
heroism in the gate for the eternal afterlife in the immortal body of the nation. The
nation itself was conceived of as the eternal community of the dead, the living, and the
still unborn, bounded together in the great corpus mysticum of the nation through the
unbreakable ties of common blood and historical destiny.
In this mystical vein, Codreanu defined the nation (neamul) as including in the same
communion of blood, soil, and faith (Blut, Boden und Geist) the temporal communities
of the contemporaries, the predecessors, and the successors, that is to say: 1. All the
Romanians presently alive, 2. All the souls of our dead and the tombs of our ancestors,
3. All those who will be born Romanians.114 The final aim of the nation, Codreanu
established in his political theology, is not life, but resurrection, when Romanian
people will rise from the dead and present themselves, as a corporate body, before
Gods final judgement.115 Until this noblest and most sublime final moment will
come, the Legionnaires are deemed to receive the baptism of blood and the crown
of death for redeeming the Romanian nation within human history, working through
their self-sacrifices to its inner-worldly salvation in the realm of the socio-historical
hic et nunc.
In articulating the radical doctrine of sacrificial patriotism around the mystical will
to martyrdom, the Legionary worldview sacralized violent death as the supreme
patriotic sacrament in the worship of the nation. Two major features set apart the
Legions sacralization of death from the similar acts performed before and during
the First World War. First, although the Legion did not pioneer the justification of
military death in religious terms, it did surpass its precedents by articulating not
only a political theodicy, but an elaborated political theology of national redemption.
This was endowed with an eschatological finality consisting in the resurrection of the
nation, ideas of vicarious atonement and collective redemption, whose cornerstone rest
on the sacrament of heroic martyrdom. Secondly, whereas in previous renditions of
Romanian patriotism, including the Great War, heroic death for the cause of the
country was defined as the state of exception, the Legion institutionalized martyric
heroism as a state of normality. Therefore, the crucial feature demarcating the Legionary sacrificial patriotism from other conceptions of Romanian patriotism is the
formers institutionalization of the state of exception concerning the necessity of
114
115

Ibid., pp. 425, 472.
25
sacrifice. This urgency of embracing the categorical imperative of martyrdom can only
be made sense of when set against the Legions political theology in whose light what
was at stake was not only the countrys political freedom, but also the nations
redemption before history and God.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Mihai Stelian Rusu is an assistant lecturer at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania.
He holds a doctoral degree in sociology from Babe-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
Romania. He has published in fields ranging across nationalism studies, education, and
the politics of memory.

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Politics, Religion & Ideology

ISSN: 2156-7689 (Print) 2156-7697 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftmp21

The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian

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Date: 16 September 2016, At: 07:58

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY, 2016

The Sacralization of Martyric Death in Romanian Legionary

The paper explores the radical morphing of Romanian patriotism in

Introduction: nation-building, war, and the martialization of patriotism

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

consensus in fascist studies, founded on the harmonization of Gentiles approach of the

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

The Legionary movement and the fascistization of sacrificial patriotism

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

tradition, the aestheticization of violence was subordinated to a more mystical aesthetics of

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

Unknown Soldier was prepared to be transported by a funeral train to Bucharest, where it

Clark, Sfnt tineree legionar, p. 115.

Chapel of Glory, a circular structure adorned with Orthodox paraphernalia (iconostasis,

Bucur, Heroes and Victims, p. 130.

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

Political martyrdom, national redemption, and vicarious atonement: the

Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, p. 238.

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

efului de cuib, described by Constantin Iordachi as a pseudo-monastic Regula designed as

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

gateway to heavens, Legionnaires were similarly searching salvation through death. It is

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

Conclusions: the self-sacrificial dimension of patriotism

Codreanu, Pentru legionari, p. 423.

POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

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