A unique case of rural pedagogy: Father Nicodim Măndiță

Born on 26 October 1889 in the village of Bunești, Zărnești commune, Argeș county, Nicolae Măndiță, the son of a ploughman, was interested in reading from an early age, especially religious one, the only one available in his rural environment. In search of it, as he grew older, the child came to Bucharest to buy books. Abbot Simeon of the Darvari Hermitage in the capital recalls that he would stop here to read even the press, always taking notes on what he had read.

At the end of his military service, he rejoined the army, took part in the war with Bulgaria and in the First World War, after which, with his chest full of decorations, he retired under his name: Nicodemus, to seek salvation in the hermitage of Măgura in Moldavia, next to which a monument had been erected to the fallen heroes, his brothers in arms, so as not to leave them in the loneliness of their final sleep.

The gift he chose for his ordination was to bring people back to God. The decision not to accept payment for his services was opposed by popular piety, which understood the “sacrifice” necessary to for the prayers to be received prayers. He abandoned this first decision and instead decided that any money accepted for services would be used exclusively to buy books of Christian doctrine to give to the faithful. He soon felt the need to strengthen his power to convert by new and original means. He turned to the design of pamphlets and books, using the same money he had painstakingly collected through his work as a priest.

Everything he wrote during his life was collected in the collection: “Library of Orthodoxy” – a name chosen by an illiterate believer (and adopted by the undersigned, with the addition: “New Series”, for the publication, first of all, of volumes of stories about the lives of his peasant disciples, from which the portrait of the confessor of all of them would emerge: Nicodemus Măndiță, an epic of Nicodemism, the school of Protosyngellos Nicodemus Măndiță carried out with the help of the books written by him and spread by his disciples).

How did he manage to persuade people with little knowledge of culture, acquired in four or at most seven primary classes, to read a large number of books first, and then to read them assiduously and uninterruptedly until the end of their lives? Or, even more unexpectedly, to apply this work to illiterate people of advanced age?

The canon to which he subjected his faithful in order to achieve this goal, the canon according to their confession, was essentially the reading of an impressive number of books, up to seventy-two, for habituation, each of about three hundred pages. Of course, the number of books depended on the sins confessed and the age of the person seeking forgiveness. The list was kept by some of the older disciples; they kept it at the disposal of the newcomers, to whom they could also lend the volumes. If the books were nowhere to be found, others could be read, the only edifying thing being that they were of the same size – about three hundred title pages.

In the case of the bookless, the canon required them to… “read by ear”! That is, to have others read to them, paying them with the money they kept for services offered for the forgiveness of sins. In connection with this, his insistence leads to a wonderful appreciation of books, so that even the illiterate are accustomed to make them a gift, the gift of books being considered the most welcome offering, as one that the permanent and tireless teacher provides. The gift of food is wasted, the gift of objects or clothes wears out and perishes; the book is given without losing any of the freshness of the teaching.

I know a woman who, at the age of twelve, received the canon to read the New Testament four times. Why four times? Because the child was not used to following the lines and the meaning of what was printed. So she was offered the method of getting the meaning by insisting on going back to the text. The wise hieromonk did not want the reading to remain unmotivated because of only partial immersion in the depths of the text; he hoped to support it as much as possible by returning again and again to the fundamental book until the reader was enlightened as deeply as possible.

The new teacher had to confront various reading vices of which he was not even aware before putting his technique into practice. For example, the hieromonk categorically recommends reading in the correct way, starting at one end of the book and finishing at the other, and not by reading  the hand, as some people often do.

This canon of constant reading is not only for educational purposes, because if we want to stop sinning, we need to know not only what sin is, but also how to avoid it and overcome it. It also has the purpose of preventing you from sinning by filling your life with joys that keep you at home, at the table where you read. Father said to someone: “I, brother, have not given you a canon that you should not fulfil. I have given you work for the future, to keep you away from some great sins, like gambling, these anti-Christian parties. Let us be occupied. Let’s pick up the book and read, let’s learn about our faith”. The purpose of this canon it is crystal clear: to teach us and help us to spend our leisure time in cleanliness and improvement.

“If you can, read; the more you read, the more you enlighten yourself,” says Mother Mitrodora, adding: “I used to carry a book in my pocket when I went to the forest, to the woods or elsewhere, I used to read there”.

Another canon, inextricably linked to the previous one, was the aforementioned recommendation to give away books bought specifically for this purpose. In the case of people who were too poor to afford such purchases, the confessor recommended that books to be copied and handed out to spread the doctrine. Copying also had a personal purpose: it accompanied reading, reinforcing it in a different way, as an additional means of getting used to it. Copying also had an ordinary purpose: to spread the teaching of manuscripts that had not yet been printed or of books that were out of print.

Father did not give lessons in writing, spelling and punctuation. What the villager he used as a copyist did not learn in time remained unlearned. The confessor, on the other hand, relied on an army of copyists. Once he had decided to encourage one or another to copy a manuscript for the distribution of religious texts, the hieromonk gave him complete freedom to apply the rules of writing, relying on his older knowledge.

Where did all these helpers of Father Nicodim Mandiță acquire their knowledge of the Romanian language, thoroughly and without hesitation? But where did the head of this immense secretariat of pious literature acquire his own knowledge in the same field? I mentioned the confessor. He had not had the good fortune to attend a school above the primary classes when he set out on his scholarly odyssey. All of them, the writer and his pupils, were indebted to the wonderful Romanian village school of another time.

Under the influence of the personality of Father Nicodim Mandiță, a conquering and convincing personality to the point of silencing all reservations, these people, his disciples, find the harbour where they feel… at home. And home they really are! Father Nicodemus had awakened in them an appetite for reading and a love of books, which they had come into contact with in the few school lessons they had attended. Fascinated by his creative power, by his dedication to spreading Orthodox knowledge by such unorthodox means (pardon the pun!), by the fidelity of his disciples, the fruit of the same strength of character shown by the monk, they in turn fell into the beneficial wave of his influence. Suddenly they felt useful in a way that no other occupation had made them feel. They set out on the royal path of the book. To this end they sacrifice their hours of sleep, their leisure time, which is skilfully robbed from them by the miserable number of hours of day and night, their physical strength and all the strength of their hope of salvation.

From now on they will be the copyists of Father Nicodemus’ writings and the distributors of his books, along with so many others.

The exhortation to love books became the talent entrusted to the servants; it was to be multiplied by spreading the noble passion and the desire to copy precious books in order to give them away, so that learning would never remain in one person.

When copying was agreed upon, it was not done on the apprentice’s expense. He received notebooks or money to buy them, pencils, pencil cases, ink, pens, erasers, etc. The examination (or the handing over of the texts obtained by copying) took place every two or three weeks. When a disciple was sent to a distant place with books or manuscripts, his confessor always took care to give him money in advance for his journey.

One of my pupils, Anica Cupu, when asked what she thought about the purpose of copying, answered without hesitation: “For the salvation of the soul”! Her inner attitude towards this activity is not that of a canon. She exclaimed with pathos that she loved what she was doing; she repeated it several times out of conviction: she copied for love, she said. And she remained known as one of the apprentices who copied the most. Like all the other apprentices, she set up a system of borrowing religious books in her village that is still in use today, a quarter of a century after the revival of the Church’s scriptures. There was also a widespread system of copying religious books, carried out by many people, with the finished manuscripts in turn being lent to those who wanted them.

Initially, books were distributed by slinging them on the back. As money began to accumulate, a horse-drawn cart was bought, and this was replaced by a horse-drawn carriage. A cinema projector and some films with religious themes were also purchased. Admission to the cinema, set up ad hoc in the village school, was free. However, anyone wishing to enter the cinema had to buy one or more pamphlets or books instead of a ticket.

From the beginning, Father Nicodim was assisted by Vasile Poețelea and the brothers Ion and Constantin Măgirescu, who gave up everything in their personal lives (marriage, work, property, etc.) to dedicate themselves to the distribution of books. When the time came, they moved to Bucharest as book editors. Gheorge Palade joined them as a typist and technician in general. They gave orders to the printers and followed their execution with a critical sense, with rigour, with responsibility, with sharpness, in the process of producing the book, printed according to the typescripts made by the latter.

The image of the writer Nicodim Măndiță looking at a book “as big as a door” – “The Pidalion” – in order to support the ideas he put down on paper with quotations (“He picked the flowers, the honey from the flowers, when he wrote in books”), also urges the students to be curious about the fundamental works left by the Holy Fathers, as well as foreign language prints with extraordinary graphics or even bibliophiles, or to research Romanian dictionaries, grammar books, etc., out of a humble desire to imitate the life of the monk dedicated to literature and to help him. … from a humble desire to imitate and help the life of the monk dedicated to literature. Moreover, this curiosity is also expressed by one of them with whom I exchanged some impressions. He mentions the copy of “The Aerial Toll Houses”, a book of some 30,000 pages that was lost when the group was arrested in 1964: “I couldn’t wait to write another page to see what it was being said!” The tiredness of the intellectual work – to return to this point – often led Father to skip lunch, deep in meditation on his reading and writing.

Since we have also mentioned the blot on the life of these great and unusual lovers of culture – the fact that they were brought before the military tribunal at a time when all political prisoners in Romania had been released by decree – it must be remembered that this led to the confiscation of tens of tons of books and typewriters, manuscripts and copies (at least 3,000 notebooks), all of which were melted down after the trial. The 39 typewritten volumes, totalling some 16,000 pages, with the title ‘Apocalyptic Scenes’ were lost.

Sick in the last period of his life, after his release, the confessor did not hesitate to fulfil his duty towards his disciples, although he was “barely able to stand”; but he was no longer “happy to have guests” because of the malicious eyes that watched him when he met them. The guards had managed to break the oak tree: “He stopped working, he stopped writing. What he was working on – he was working, but he wasn’t what he used to be. He was being followed”.

The release from prison did not mean a change in the Christian life and discipline of the disciples. Except that they stopped printing and distributing books. They continued to live as they had been taught, reading at dawn, during the day, morning, afternoon, evening and night.

The revolution of ’89 immediately mobilised the few people in Bucharest. They opened a publishing house, Agapis, and started reprinting the books of Father Nicodemus. With the help of two vans, they transported them to the mountain tops, where their volunteer lecturers were eagerly awaiting them. I accompanied one of them and was amazed at the love with which Romanian peasants buy books. How they lend them to each other, how they comment on their content, their typographical achievements or failures.

I am a writer, and I have wondered with bitterness why the Romanian secular book publishers, the promoters of the culture of the future, do not manage to mobilise themselves in order to spread the writings of our classics, at least where they are needed. Pupils in the countryside have no books and no one to teach them the beauty and usefulness of reading. Thank God that, thanks to the Agapis publishing house, the book for which Father Nicodemus worked and suffered is not rotting in warehouses, but is making its way more and more into the world of Romanian villages. Thanks to these readers, national culture is not dying! Today, when no one reads in the cities, we still have a hope of not perishing as a nation: there are peasants who want to learn how to live and how to save themselves!

And how much respect for intellectual work we found in their ranks! Two years in a row I attended the funeral of the church writer Nicodim Mandiță in the cemetery of the Agapia Monastery, together with thousands of lovers of his memory. The publishing house, which had published a collection of aphorisms from his work, presented 2,000 copies there, as an alms for his soul. I would like to add that I was taken to most of his living disciples to talk to them, to get to know their memories, their opinions, their regrets, their love, and to print on magnetic tape the conversations I had with them, with a view to writing books that would culminate in a biography of Father Mandiță, taken from the previous ones. The hot summers in Bucharest are not conducive to tedious computer work. The publishing house gave me the opportunity to work in the unused flat of one of its employees. My printer, so necessary for preparing texts for printing, left me, and the publisher rewarded my work by buying a new one. For the first time in my life I feel the usefulness of my work as a writer, I feel that it gives pleasure to someone, I feel that someone cares about my intellectual effort and the waste of my physical strength – why not? I feel important to someone. I feel that I have the same experience as the peasant reader. Isn’t that how a creator should feel? Especially if the collaboration with the publisher is based on the following principles:

“Don’t force yourself to create or embellish the Father’s aura;

“Let objectivity and reason prevail over emotion;

“Let us not forget that the Father was regarded by his contemporaries and is regarded by some of our contemporaries with superiority, and therefore, in order not to be ridiculed, any support for him must be very balanced and well-founded;

“As for the activity of those who seek to continue the Father’s work, it must be treated very discreetly and only mentioned when it is most needed.”

Thank God that there are still … peasants and that they are book-loving scholars! As long as they take part in the progress of Romanian culture, we will not die, even though the times do not seem to be very favourable for writing, learning, reading, surviving…

Anica Țupu’s portrait of the confessor is complete, concise and overly spiritual: “From his face, his manner, his voice, he seemed to me to be an angel of God”. Short for two! She has cut the Gordian knot of an impossible description by resorting to a reference to heaven, in order to understand man better… There is an addition that brings the person portrayed back down to earth: “He seemed to me very gentle and very patient and very close to our souls”.

So gentle and patient and understanding that he thought first of all of keeping the sinner alive and pleasing him, rather than of being angry with him due to his sins. And in order to improve relations with him – who had left Christian society through sin – the priest used his own books to obtain the money needed to help the sinner. A serious moral offence was committed by a younger blood sister of Anica Cupu. She was so angry that she either had to send her away or leave the family home herself. But the confessor, instead of encouraging this, decided that Anica should love the offender, take care of her and protect her. This was enough for the sister to become the joy of the narrator’s life again. And to make sure that the confessor would not let the burden of her upkeep exceed her economic capacity, “he gave me books worth of two thousand lei to sell”, as she recalls.

The role of the unseen presence of the Grand Confessor is that of a magnet, as well as that of a binder of all the souls who loved and love him, not because of their own merits, but solely because of his vocation and his unique personality. What Father Nicodemus’ personality has achieved in the field of rural and Christian education is unique. I believe that in the whole history of human pedagogy no one has gone as far as he has, not even his model, who is often quoted in his writings: Pestalozzi. Let us pause for a last moment with one of his students to listen to his lesson one last time.

Gheorghe Gavriliu is the one who, not liking his book in his own time, comes – after the “schooling” imposed by his confessor – to state bluntly: “At my age, as an old man, I can only tell you this: WHOEVER DOESN’T ADVICE READING MISTAKES”. And he added, referring to all the other confessors: “WHOEVER DOESN’T READ MISTAKES”.

I hope that the members of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church will hear this last cry and support the idea that the confessor must educate Christians, urge them, teach them, require them to read, buy books, make gifts, copy them when money is lacking. If secular education has abandoned the honour of fighting national illiteracy, the Church, the first teacher of the Romanians, is obliged to take up the torch of education of our fellow citizens.

(Mihai Rădulescu – The Process of Communism)