A knight of the ineffable: writer and university professor Alexandru Mironescu
The reader is often driven by an irresistible curiosity to know the life and character of the writer whose literary work has captivated him. More often than not, however, they are disappointed by the discrepancy between the noble power of the writings and the moral profile of the author. In his famous book The Intellectuals, Paul Johnson masterfully used his acerbic tone to expose such cases (Rousseau, Tolstoy, Sartre, Hemingway, Brecht).
The reader’s satisfaction is all the greater when he discovers that the creative man is in perfect harmony with his act of creation, continuing and intertwining with it. Such a rare example is the writer and scholar Alexandru Constantin (Codin) Mironescu, and it seems as if those of us who had the privilege of knowing him even a little regret that for future generations only his work will remain to speak of his wonderful human presence.
He was a gentle, warm, open, laconic man with a keen sense of observation. A man whose outward gestures, however small, were well formed in his innermost being after a long and arduous gestation. I remember, for example, that in church he did not light many small candles accompanied by many even smaller crosses for each member of the family, as most people did, but only one large candle. The gesture was well thought out and carefully motivated: “I’m lighting only one big candle so that I can be present for the whole Mass”[1]. He was a generous man, with much discernment, with a comforting sense of full responsibility. He did not speak gratuitously, his words had weight and precise purpose.
A wave of the constant turmoil that stirred and dominated his interior life swept over his face, an ocean of questions from which the answers were slowly but surely crystallising. “As for me, the realities over which I really stumbled… were not like chairs and stones, but of the gentle order of the ineffable. The chair I pushed aside or bypassed. It was easier for me to solve a material problem, such as feeding the children, than to reach a real understanding with the man I had to get along with,”[2] he wrote in Kairos, his story extempore.
Alexandru Mironescu was a thoroughbred intellectual, a seeker of essences, a thirst for the sublime, for divinity. “Like ivy on the right oak, I stretch out my burning love to you; / With weak tangles of thoughts I manage to embrace you; / And every prayer is a kiss”, writes Dr Vasile Voiculescu in his poem dedicated to his friend Alexandru, written during the extravagant period of the Antim Monastery Circle (30 December 1954).
His life was relatively simple and upwardly mobile. He was born on 10 July 1903 in Tecuci, Moldavia. His family claims Veniamin Cătulescu among its ancestors, in a line of scholars and high priests. Also preserved in the family is an invitation from the Marshal of the Court and the Royal House, by order of Their Majesties, to the Court Evening of 27 February 1885, addressed to Mr Theodor Mironescu (the writer’s grandfather or uncle), his wife and daughter. The birth of Alexandru Constantin was announced by his father, Major Victor Mironescu, and his mother, Elena, née Budișteanu.
He attended the Faculty of Science in Bucharest and graduated in 1926. In 1929 he obtained a doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne, Faculty of Science, in France, and in the same year began his brilliant career as professor of organic chemistry at the Faculty of Science in Bucharest, turning down a post offered to him in Paris. Later, Alexandru Mironescu added to his list of titles the title of Doctor of Philosophy and corresponding member of the Bucharest Academy of Sciences.
In short, a path that began categorically and clearly at the age of 26. With a clear mind and a strong character, he embraced the destiny that had already prepared the first hard event for him: his father, a colonel, lost his entire fortune in a card game and the family was plunged into debt, with young Mironescu, the eldest of his four brothers (all boys), taking on much more responsibility.
Of course, his dedication to science and the problems of knowledge are attributes of a great intelligence. As a teenager, he studied Paul Valery with passion, then went to Paris to listen to Nikolai Berdiaev and the other Russian mystical thinkers who had fled to France along with the leading French intellectuals. Alongside his scientific studies, he was interested in the role of personality in history, as he himself confessed. He experienced the pathetic feeling of social freedom and was concerned with the existential dimension of man. This dualism in the nature of his preoccupations would mark his entire spiritual evolution, as he gradually conquered territories that were difficult to reach through direct knowledge, and crystallised his gains in unequivocal formulas typical of the scientist’s terminology. […]
The change of regime also brought profound changes in the life of the scholar and writer Alexandru Mironescu. Although he was the head of his family (he married Maria Constantin and had two children, Ileana and Șerban), he refused any collaboration or compromise. At first he refused tempting offers from the Romanian Writers’ Association, the radio, etc. Then, over the years, he gradually lost everything, until finally he had a university professorship and the right to publish. […]
The writer responded to Father Vasile Vasilache’s call for the renovation of the Antirn Monastery in 1944-1947 and was an active member of the committee. It became a custom for intellectuals to meet every Thursday evening in the spiritual oasis of the monastery’s chapel. According to Father Vasilache in his memoirs “From Antim to Pocrov”, it was here that Ion Marin Sadoveanu read about the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, Vasile Voiculescu presented numerous poems, Anton Dumitriu, Mircea Vulcănescu and Alexandru Mironescu explored themes of religious philosophy. The years 1945-1953 were years of great spiritual heights, of enthusiastic mystical enthusiasm. The exuberant atmosphere of the monastery’s cenacle continued with innumerable other moments of exuberant religious experience, for sometimes, after Holy Mass, Sunday afternoon conferences were organised for the general public, given by selected confessors of Orthodoxy, such as Archimandrites Haralambie Vasilache and Benedict Ghiuș, or Fathers Sofian Boghiu and Andrei Scrima. […]
The religious movement of the Burning Bush of Antim became a dangerous element for the communist regime’s plan to annihilate the people through atheism and to systematically destroy any intellectual preoccupation outside the worship of the country’s leadership. This was followed by the wave of arrests in 1958, when trials were staged to condemn innocent but dignified, uncompromising people to years in prison. Sandu Tudor, who had retired to the Rarău hermitage in 1953 under the name of the hermit Daniil, was particularly targeted. All active members of the Burning Bush Circle were arrested and sentenced. The writer Codin Mironescu, who had given Sandu Tudor shelter in his house, was arrested together with his son. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison.
What followed was the cruel period of communist imprisonment, during which the human being was reduced to the lack of vital elements of the body (through cold, hunger, darkness, dampness, denial of natural needs, beatings, torture, untreated illness, humiliation, isolation, in which the extremes of physical and mental suffering met in a piercing cry of the spirit, putting the latter in mortal danger. “Ah, the terrible pity, the wilderness of love and hate/ When the heart cracks like dry wood/ When the frost of astral solitude freezes the ashes of shattered nerves!”/ I hear the tattered, tired, clanging tassels/ And the ragged flesh flapping flags/ Sailing with hurricane sails/ The thundering masts!” (“Salmanasar”, in Philokalic Poems).
In this period, much of the flowering of the Romanian intelligentsia between the wars died. […]
Codin Mironescu, having passed through a period of grim purgatory and having returned to the world physically weakened after the general amnesty of 1964, continued his spiritual ascent. Looking back, in his book “The Flower of Fire”, he records his personal experience of a whole human life as a result of his commitment to the spiritual order of Orthodoxy.
This was followed by the serene period of the “Philokalic Poems”. But the body, sorely tried by suffering, could no longer keep pace with the soul and gradually, sadly, gave way. On 20 January 1973, after the heavy yoke of cancer, he died with his soul radiant and his spirit in the peace of heavenly heights. Even on his deathbed, despite the agony of the disease, he prayed unceasingly, as the living tradition of the Orthodox Christian Church had taught him.
The serenity of the worlds beyond, which he felt, embellished and softened the features of his face, worn by his illness. As Father Benedict Ghiuș confessed, his whispered words had the overtones of a Christian Socrates when he said: “When the end comes, I will not disappear. I will have other relationships with you, with children, with these things, with people, but I will not disappear, I will endure”.
The poem “Silence”, written six months before his death, begins with the lines: “What will the world be like, Lord, when the spirit leaves the body?/ We learn unexpected, amazing things when old habits break! “And the last poem of the same philokalic cycle (entitled “The Great Light” and dated 22 October 1972, the day of the “Seven Youths of Ephesus”) ends with the proclamation: “I call to God and he comes, life, truth come, they are within everyone’s reach, the way of eternity is opened/ Christ has risen from the dead!/ Christ has risen from the dead!/ Christ has risen from the dead!
(Horia Ion Groza, Bucharest, 23 January 1996 – Alexandru Mironescu. Centenary of his birth 1903-2003, edited by Ileanea Mironescu, Enciclopedica Publishing House, Bucharest, 2003, pp. 121-129)