Vladimir Truhlar

Karel Vladimir Truhlar was born on 3 September 1912 in Gorizia - a town within the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, František Truhlař – of Czech origins – was an employee of the railway lines. His mother, Marija Malnerčič, came from Divača. When the Italians were going to attack the Isonzo Front (Spring 1915) the family went to Jesenice in the High Carniola, where the impoverished family lived for some years in an attic.

In the changed political conditions of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, he attended the compulsory primary school (1918-26), and was generally considered as a clever and lively youth. Due to his excellent grades, and with the help of donors, he enrolled in Grammar high school, which he finished in 1933.

The high school period in Ljubljana was very intense both for his spiritual formation and literary vocation. During this period Truhlar was heavily influenced by a professor named Ernest Tomc, and he also joined the Catholic associations "Dijaški Orel" (Students’ Eagle) and "Marijina Kongregacija" (Marian Congregation). Later he also joined "Mlajci" (Young People). Meanwhile, Truhlar was regarded as a leader of the "Green Ties", a students’ movement organized in Ljubljana to protest against the despotism of Alexander I.

During his last year of high school, Truhlar decided to become a priest. He thus entered in the diocesan seminary (1933) to study philosophy, which he finished after two years (1934-36) at the Gregorian University in Rome with the thesis "Das Erkennen der Existenz" (The Knowledge of Existence). This period is attributed to Truhlar's affirmation of the philosophical theories of Aleš Ušeničnik (1868-1951).

Truhlar returned to Ljubljana in 1936, where he continued his study of theology. Unsatisfied with the typical structure of theological study, he instead turned to the theories of R. Guardini[1], Maréchal and other contemporary thinkers who promoted the existentialist aspect of philosophical research.

Even though he was a student at the seminary, he had to absolve his military obligations (July-December ’38) in Osjek, Oriental Slavony, where he had the chance to go deeper in his spoken knowledge of Serbo-Croatian language. In his spare moments in this town on the river Drava he started to read Solovjëv’s works, that opened in front of him the infinite possibilities of a "Christian philosophy" build on the "metaphysics of uni-totality".

Truhlar was ordered priest on 29 October 1939 and got his degree in theology in June 1941 with the thesis "Der Vergöttlichungeprocess bei Vladimir Solovjëv" (The process of divinization in Vladimir Solovjëv). He spent the war period alternating short periods of specialization in Rome with the activity of spiritual guide at the seminary in Ljubljana. Here he decided to dedicate himself indefinitely to spiritual theology, but, meanwhile, he also cultivated intensely the study of dogmatic, as testified by the essay "Nauk Vladimira Solovjëva o razvoju dogme" (Vladimir Solovjëv’s doctrine on the evolution of dogma), published in "Bogoslovni Vestnik" (n. 24, 1944, pp. 279-90).

In the spring and summer of 1945, he followed the events of the so-called "Rožman’s faculty" first in Praglia (Padova), then in Alto Adige. The following year (18 November 1946), though, on the advice of father Augustine Bea he entered the Society of Jesus, an order devoted to "fidei defensio et propagatio". He spent thus his novitiate (1946-48) in Pullach (near Munchen) where he met as a spiritual guide father Albert Stögger, a man of rare sensitivity, entirely devoted to the connection between his human richness and Saint Ignatius’ spirituality. In his school, Truhlar conceived the basis of his anthropology and of his Christology. In this environment was thus "invented" that path of "experiential research" later declined by Truhlar during his whole lifetime. As here were put the first roots of that Christological humanism known as experience of the Absolute (izkustvo Absolutnega) that T always tried to cultivate and deepen. In other words for T studying was an "itinerarium mentis in Deum" and "contemplatio" was "the acategorial perception of the absolute, in contrast with the discursive knowledge and the active construction of life on the basis of this discursive rationality". Contemplation and action became thus in his conception an inseparable binomial so that one cannot subsist without the other.

In 1949, he received the invitation from the Gregorian to go to Rome to get integrated into the teaching group of that university. With the collaboration of father Stögger, he prepared research on Saint Ignatius’ interiority, published in the "Revue d’ascetique et de mystique". Furthermore, an extract of this work – with the title "Das Gotfunden des hl. Ignatius in sein letzen Jahren" – was judged as the exact interpretation of Saint Ignatius’ spirituality. And with this business card – together with four other essays – he introduced himself as "professor extra-ordinarius" at the Gregorian. He was a lecturer from 1950, then he became a full professor in 1956. Here, for a short time, Truhlar occupied the chair of Mariology. But he soon manifested to rector father Dezza the wish he could devote his research and his teaching exclusively to spiritual theology.

Come to that purpose he felt "a man with great soul and great ideas" in harmony with Saint Ignatius’ spirit he had embraced as a choice and vocation. Truhlar was born to study, that is to say, that he conceived studying as an action in the world. As for spiritual theology then, he conceived it in a particular light, "as an initiation to the Christian experience"[2]. Considering that the term "experience” meant for him «a feeling, a perception with which the spirit, or better, the man in his totality joins a content (himself, the absolute…) not through the concepts and their chain in the mental discourse (e.g. through the concepts and the ideas concerning the subsoil one can get to the center of a volcano), but through the immediate footprint of one’s self, of the absolute… and through the reaction of the answer of a man who integrates this footprint»[3]. Around half of the Sixties, his lessons were attended by approximately 300/350 students, coming from about thirty national colleges. These activities though saw the participation of one hundred religious orders and congregations, too. Truhlar’s lessons covered a various range of topics, such as spiritual theology of secularity and of monasticism, theology of work and of free time, the sacred absolute and the aesthetic absolute, politics, and Weltanschauung, senses-spirit-experience, poetry, and spiritual life. Year after year, his teaching went through an evolution, passing from the analysis of single letters from St Paul to Christian humanism, from exquisitely religious topics to other ones, concerning gnosiology and above all aesthetics. In these deepening of his, though, he always started from the «“distinction” between a “rational” (conceptual, discursive) knowledge, to exclude experience as such, and an “intellective, a-conceptual, a-categorial” knowledge, that was considered and is considered as an essential constituent of experience»[3]

For around ten years he collaborated with the review "Meddobje", published in Argentina by the anti-communist emigration. Here he published the Christological essay "Razvijanje in križanje človeške narave" (Development and crucifixion of human nature) (1956,n. 4-5, pp. 169-74) and the theological reflection "Preobražanje sveta in beg pred njim" (Transformation of the world and escape in front of it) (1956-57, n. 1-2, pp. 1-9). In 1958 was published in Buenos Aires the collection of lyrics "Nova Zemlja" (The new land) and in "Meddobje" the essay "Krščanska doraslost" (Christian maturity). The following year appeared the reflection "Problem osebne pokorščine" (The problem of personal obedience) (1959, n. 3-4, pp. 93-99). Always in "Meddobje" (1961, n. 3-4, pp. 105-12) appeared the poetic cycle of the Baptist followed by the essay-commentary "Revolucija, konservatorizem in življenje kulture" (Revolution, conservatism and life of the culture). In the same year was published by SKA (Cultural Slovenian Action)[4] in Buenos Aires his second poetic collection "Rdeče bivanje" (The red existence).

His interview of 24 May 1965, though, where he claims that some writers belonging to the anti-communist diaspora do not have a correct comprehension of the internal events in Slovenia, caused a breaking inside the SKA, marking also the end of this "institution" as a spiritual guide of Slovenian emigration. Refused by "Meddobje", the interview was published in Trieste by the review "Mladika" with the title "Pogovor pod Kvirinalom" (1966, X, n. 1, pp. 9-12).

At the end of 1969, in Celje, it was printed at Mohorjeva Družba "V dnevih šumi Ocean" (In the days the Ocean whispers), a republication of his previous collections reviewed and ordered in seven sections and two cycles. In 1971 he published at the Queriniana in Brescia "Concetti fondamentali della teologia spirituale", where emerge the peculiar features of his gnosiology and of his ontology. In 1973 in Celje was published his second lyrical collection "Luč iz črne prsti" (The light from black silt). In the same year was published his rich "Lessico di spiritualità" where the terms of the Catholic ethos are revisited in the light of a modern sensitivity.

At the end of 1974, at the age of 62 - after having spent around 25 years in Rome devoted to "an intense didactic and research activity"[5] - Truhlar asked and obtained his retreat coming back to his motherland in the house of the Jesuits in Dravlje, a suburb of Ljubljana. The Yugoslavian authorities had guaranteed him freedom of speech and action, or at least that is what he thought. Actually, his last years were empoisoned by the attacks of the conservative clergy, reluctant to the conciliar innovations, and by the vexations of the Yugoslavian police. Convinced of the impossibility to operate in his motherland, he left Dravlje in June 1976 to retreat in voluntary exile in Longomoso (Bolzano). Here he suddenly died for a cerebral ischemia attack on the morning of 4 January 1977.

After his death was published for the interest of his sister Zora and of his faithful student Lojze Bratina "Doživljanje absolutnega v slovenskem leposlovju" (The story of absolute in Slovenian literature) – a series of essays previously appeared in the review "Znamenje" – and the two unpublished collections of lyrics "Motnordeči glas" (The murky red voice) and "Kri" (Blood). To these autonomous texts of Truhlar’s we can add two works written in collaboration with Professor G. Thils of the Catholic University in Leuven:

• "Laïcat et sainteté I." Laïcs et la vie chrétienne parfaite, Rome 1963 (German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese translation)
• "Laïcat et sainteté II." Sainteté et vie dans le siècle, Rome (Italian, Spanish and Portuguese translation)

Moreover, Professor Truhlar published around 250 articles and essays for various reviews, voices for dictionaries and theological encyclopedias, among which also the famous post-conciliar theological encyclopedia "Sacramentum mundi", edited by K. Rahner.

Among the most representative texts of his theological bibliography it is worth here indicating:

• "De experiential mystica", Rome, 1951
• "Antinomiae vitae spiritualis" (Dialectics of Spiritual Life), Rome, 1958 (Italian and Spanish translation)
• "Problemata theological de vita spirituali laicorum et religiosorum", Rome, 1960
• “Labor christianus” (For a Theology of Work), Rome, 1961 (Italian and Spanish translation)
• “Christusfahrung” (Christ our Experience), Rome, 1964 (Italian, Spanish and Dutch translation)
• "Fuite du monde et conscience chrétienne d’aujourd’hui", Rome,1965 (Italian translation)
• "L’ora dei laici", Torino, 1966 (Spanish translation)
• "Teilhard und Solowjev". Dichtung und religiöse Erfahrung. Freiburg-München, 1966 (Italian and Spanish translation)
• "Sul mondo d’oggi", Meditazioni teologiche, Brescia, 1967
• "Pokoncilski katoliški ethos" (Postconciliar Catholic Ethos), Celje, 1968 (Italian Translation)
• "Katolicizem v poglobitvenem procesu" (Catholicism in Process of Deepening), Celje, 1971
• "Concetti fondamentali della teologia spirituale", Brescia, 1971
• "Lessico di spiritualità", Brescia, 1973
• "Leksikon duhovnosti", Celje, 1974

• "Nova Zemlja", Buenos Aires, 1958
• "Rdeče Bivanje", Buenos Aires, 1961
• "V dnevih šumi Ocean", Celje, 1969
• "Luč iz črne prsti", Celje, 1973
• "Motnordeči glas" (posthumous), Ljubljana-Dravlje, 1979
• "Kri" (posthumous), Ljubljana-Dravlje, 1979

• Autobiographic notes, Archives Sv. Jakob, Ljubljana
• Vl. Truhlar, "Concetti fondamentali della teologia spirituale", Queriniana, Brescia, 1971
• Vl. Truhlar, "Lessico di spiritualità", Queriniana, Brescia, 1973
• Vl. Truhlar, "Leksikon duhovnosti", Celje, 1974
• O. Simčič, "L’assoluto nel pensiero e nell’esperienza di Vladimir Truhlar", "Iniziativa isontina", Gorizia, Anno XIX, n. 1/68, aprile 1977, pp. 62-63
• AA. VV., "Slovenska Izseljenska Književnost", I, Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 1999, pp. 163-69
• Vl. Truhlar, "Teologia in poesia", Lipa, Rome, 2002, pp. 209-65
• AA. VV. "Od izkustva do teologije", Mohorjeva Družba, Celje, 2004
• F. Pibernik, "Temni karmin", Mohorjeva Družba, Celje, 2007
• Vl. Truhlar, "Zbrano delo" (Edited with a commentary and notes by F. Pibernik), I-II, Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2011-13