Andrei Scrima
Andrei, or André Scrima, theologian, philosopher, and cleric, passed through the 20th century, like all his contemporaries, with religious faith, using study and experience in an attempt to make the world a better place.
Steliu Lambru, 20.06.2026, 14:00
He was born in 1925 and died in 2000, the final year of the most turbulent century in history. He studied philosophy and literature, but eventually joined the spiritual‑religious circle known as “Rugul aprins / The Burning Bush,” formed at the Antim Monastery in Bucharest. There he chose the path of monastic life. In 1956 he received a scholarship in Geneva and left Romania. He became active in ecumenism and, as a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, participated in the Second Vatican Council. In 1991, after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, he returned to Romania.
Ioan‑Alexandru Tofan is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of “Al. I. Cuza” University in Iași and the author of studies, articles, and volumes about Andrei Scrima. At Scrima’s commemoration, Tofan recounted how he wanted to learn everything that could be known about him: ” I also tried (…) to meet the people who had known Father Scrima and to gather their testimonies when the time came for me to write his biography. One thing struck me: almost everyone who spoke about their encounter with Father Scrima said the same thing—that he was an exceptional friend, he had a vocation for friendship, but at the same time he was a strange kind of friend, because he disappeared very often. He would disappear in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a relationship; somehow he would withdraw at a certain moment and vanish so that the relationship would not become petrified. There is also a letter from his colleague at the Institute for Christian‑Islamic Studies at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, wondering when Father Scrima would show up again to teach his courses.”
Friendship was an important value in which Scrima believed wholeheartedly: “I tried to see how I could understand his way of being a friend. Friendship, as Father Scrima lived it, takes on the traits and distinctive marks of spiritual experience, as he understood that experience. He sometimes uses the word friendship, and sometimes the word brotherhood. But in a text from the archive he writes: ‘Antim’—referring to the Burning Bush movement—‘was for us an island of trust, something that gave us extraordinary peace. It was a space of free exchanges, where one could endure from the depths because we had a premonition, a perception, of ultimate heights. We endured through an attitude of trust, through the depths of what is called, essentially, friendship.’ So he uses this term and reflects on it. He also writes in a well‑known text: ‘the visit of Doctor Voiculescu, an offering on Easter Day from a friend who had passed through death.’”
Movement and mobility define the material human being. But Scrima also showed their spiritual value. Ioan‑Alexandru Tofan: “What is essential in describing spiritual experience—and which then reflects on his way of being a friend—is the issue of itinerancy. Father Scrima was an itinerant. He was a person for whom nomadism, rather than rootedness, marked the encounter with transcendence. You cannot meet the Other, the radically Other, unless you yourself are in mobility, in movement. In his remarkable course taught in Beirut, at Saint Joseph University, Spiritual Experience and Its Languages, speaking about what itinerancy means as something essential in a spiritual event, he says: ‘God never comes between walls. Instead, He comes as He did at the beginning of His encounter with Man—in a tent.’ It was a tent beaten by the wind, in the provisional state of your own position. You must be willing to move in order to respond to the encounter with the Heavens.”
Alongside friendship, hospitality was another important value for Andrei Scrima. Ioan‑Alexandru Tofan: “Hospitality is an essential mark of spiritual experience; it is, in fact, a way of being in friendship with the Other—to be hospitable toward the Other, to receive him. Father Scrima says that only the nomad can truly be hospitable, because he gives nothing of what he owns; he does not give from what is his. The nomad makes it so that both host and guest partake of the same event, which makes the third visible—not the human being between the two. Every dyadic spiritual relationship is in fact a triadic one. Between two people, the third emerges—the Spirit who makes their encounter possible.”
Complementing friendship, ecumenism was also central for Scrima. Ioan‑Alexandru Tofan: Track: “The way Father Scrima conceived encounter or ecumenism is also in a friendly manner, as an experience of friendship. He says somewhere that the unity of the Churches does not need to be achieved—it already exists; it must be rediscovered. The Second Vatican Council is a hermeneutic council because the only thing we must do—the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, or the East and the West more broadly—is to rediscover our original, primary data, in which we were already together. So it is a rediscovery of being together, not an achievement to be constructed. I would see this contribution to interreligious dialogue as another form of friendship. It bears the same marks as his private friendships—marks that, in fact, belong to spiritual experience in general.”
Andrei Scrima is a key name when writing the history of Romanian religious sensibility in the 20th century. His model is that of the scholar actively present in the world of his time. (EE)
