This third volume of the Noica Anthology entitled Rostirea românească de la Eminescu cetire focuses on the major cause Noica embraced after his prison years.

He embarked upon building a thinking method of his own, which relied on the Logos, the word, or what, in Romanian, would best be called with his favourite term, rostire. The source and proof of his thinking was Eminescu, with whom he entered in a life-long symbiosis, the subtle roots of which the present volume tries to reveal. One thing is certain: Eminescu is more than a poet here. He is a thinker whom Noica expands upon, explains, revalues and brings to life again in his work. Hence, the EminescuNoica hybrid.

As Professor Cristian Ciocan of Bucharest University says, “Nowadays in Romania, Noica is the best known Romanian philosopher. He is the Philosopher, that is, the greatest figure of Romanian philosophy today. We can say this the other way: it is due to Noica that philosophy acquired in Romania in the 1960s and the ‘70s a great prestige, incredible for a country subjected to a totalitarian regime. Noica himself became almost a mass phenomenon: he had the force to pass to several generations of young people the virus of philosophising: hundreds of young people started to dream of learning ancient Greek and German in order to access the fundamental sources of philosophy. Hundreds of young intellectuals visited him, in real pilgrimages, at Păltiniş, situated deep in a mountain village of Transylvania. Briefly, the phenomenon ‘Noica’ marked in a radical manner the contemporary culture of Romania.”

Volume Three opens with a Preamble which introduces Eminescu in Noica’s words, as “the complete being”, the always present and le mal connu. It continues with an introduction entitled EminescuNoica: Axiological Linguistics, in which C. George Sandulescu, the editor of the book, finds the deep communication channel between the two. All this takes the reader from language to philosophy, with the inevitable damage done to the human mind when it is sadly hindered by the circumstances of history.

The body of the book begins with Noica’s appeal to put all the Eminescu manuscripts at the disposal of everybody. He repeats time and again that Eminescu is painfully, almost physically present in our world. All we have to do is learn how to see him. At one point, the philosopher associates the Eminescu Manuscripts with the Manuscripts of Paul Valéry, published with such great care “under the generous sponsorship of the great French establishment”.

A large part of the book is devoted to infinity: as the idea appears in the Logos of Eminescu, and in the shapes imagined by Brancusi. Noica sees in both creators the miracle of two human minds that understand a universe when most of us do not, and even try to share the insight, via the word or the stone... What the philosopher himself chooses as his thinking tool is rostirea românească. That means the use of Romanian words in an explanation of an area that body or language will never ever touch, yet will never desist from probing. The book ends, therefore, with Noica’s own explanation of the relation between rost and rostire (both from the Latin rostrum).

There are also several Appendices. The first Appendix gives the sources of the excerpts taken from texts written by Noica at various points in his life, and published as an Introduction to the Princeps Edition of the Eminescu Manuscripts. Last but not least, the volume closes with ten hermeneutic questions, which contain in themselves all the answers to all the questions raised in the whole book.

This third volume of the Noica Anthology, therefore, makes Eminescu the epitome of mystery and a teacher of wonder: a repository of meaning, the philosopher Noica claims to derive from. This intense plea for the Eminescu Manuscripts logically follows Volume Two of this Anthology, where Noica urged his Bucharest pupils: “You must see the miracles around you! This is what you must do. The miracle of nature, the miracle of man, the miracle of love. It takes so little to see a miracle. It is on our free days, during those hours when we seem to be idle, that we can become aware of miracles. There are miracles hidden all around us. All we have to do is to stretch out our hands and pick them, as it was once done in heaven. All we need is attention, and the ability to detect that particular direction which can lead each of us to seeing the miracle in things and beings. People often turn their full attention to astrology, and they say: I was born under such and such a sign, such and such a star, it governs my life, and so on. Not at all! The star is right here, so very near us that we can touch it.”

That STAR, to Noica, is The Eminescu Manuscripts.