Overcoming Psychological Torture with Geometry?

I can’t recommend a book more highly than the Interviews, Homilies, and Talks of Father George Calciu.  Father Calciu was sent to a communist re-education prison in Romania in 1948 where he suffered unspeakable torture.  He survived and was released from prison in 1965.  Then in 1978 he courageously preached a series of sermons to the youth of Romania which he knew would lead to his arrest.  This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison – much of it in solitary confinement.  The whole detailed story is amazing; filled with courage and grace. 

What does this have to do with geometry?  Father Calciu was having difficulty remembering his prayers (after days of interrogations), and when he tried to write them in chalk in his cell, his guards would beat him.  Here is what he says during the difficult period of interrogation at the beginning of his second stint in prison:

“Then I started to do something else.  Pascal was a French philosopher and a mathematician.  In his childhood he loved mathematics very much, but his father wanted to make him a lawyer and confiscated all his books of mathematics.  At twelve years of age he remade in his mind the geometry of Euclid.  So I said, I am fifty years old; I can remake the geometry that I learned in high school.  I started with a point: what can I do from this point?  Two points, a line; three points a triangle.  Thus I started to remember geometry.  This put an order in my mind!  I was oblidged to think logically, to imagine, and this ordered my mind completely…  There was great purity in this; it was like a prayer.  This order – not with three but with two dimensions – made in my mind a spirituality.  Since there was no flesh in this, no third dimension, there was nothing outside of the spirit in my mind.  So I succeeded in remembering geometry in two dimensions.  The profit of this was very great for me, not because I remembered geometry – I have forgotten it now – but because it put my mind in order.  I was able to think logically, and was able to go out of the passions – the psychological passions. 

As a result, I started to remember all the prayers.  Before I was arrested I learned the Liturgy by heart… So I was able to recite the Liturgy in the cell.”  

For an introduction to Father Calciu's life go here.