The case of Alexandru Mironescu – the meeting of the scientific spirit, the artistic spirit and the religious spirit
Although not as famous as the discoverer of insulin, Professor Alexandru “Codin” Mironescu remains a landmark in the philosophy of science in Romania, as well as in the possible good encounter between the scientific spirit, the artistic spirit and the religious spirit. A scientist and writer, a prominent figure in the spiritual group of the “Burning Bush” at the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, a man of culture but also of discreet and deep spirituality, he combined research with faith and writing with prayer, establishing himself since the interwar period as both a theorist of scientific knowledge and a novelist. Father Andrei Scrima, for his part, described him warmly in his Time of the Burning Bush.
The Spiritual Master in the Eastern Tradition (Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1996, especially pp. 142-143); Professor Mironescu burned in the living flame of spirituality at Antim, but also shared in the mutilation of many who passed through there (during the war, but also for some years after); refusing any compromise with the communist regime, he was sentenced in 1958 to 20 years in prison, of which he served 5, being released with seriously impaired health. Ten years later, at his funeral, Father Benedict Ghiuș (one of his closest friends) said:
“Alexandru Mironescu loved the authentic faith, knew it, lived it and confessed it without any emphasis, ‘with simplicity and normality’, as he liked to say himself […]. The manuscripts he left behind will testify to all his faith”.
And indeed, Alexandru Mironescu’s significant posthumous work remains, including essays, dialogues, confessions and literary writings (of more mystical than aesthetic value, a special place is occupied by the Philokalic Poems, which the author himself considered to be the culmination of his creation, and which I had the opportunity to note that Father Galeriu did not ignore, although they had not yet been published at that time).
Father Galeriu not only held Alexandru Mironescu in high esteem (both as a Christian scientist and as a former anti-communist political prisoner), but he also decided to help relaunch his publication at the beginning of the 1990s; under the aegis of the Harisma publishing house, two of the professor’s books were republished – for the first time after 1989 – and Father Galeriu found the time to preface them (in collaboration with Ion Andrei Dorobanțu): Certainty and Truth (1992) and The Limits of Scientific Knowledge. The Contribution of the Experimental Sciences to the Epistemological Problem (1994). The intention – which, unfortunately, could not be realised as such – was to (re-)publish the entire work of Mironesci in Harisma. It remains significant, however, that the father’s attention was primarily focused on the syntheses of the philosophy of science.
What the father wanted to emphasise above all (as he used to do in his sermons) was, before any other details, the attitude to knowledge and creation of a true Christian scholar, called to be an example and a model for new generations. “Human knowledge is not a calculation from here to there, from today to tomorrow. It involves strong commitments and fearful responsibilities,” says Mironescu. And Father jokes:
“This knowledge of the world around us, as well as of ourselves, is even more than a mere ‘chance’ offered to us to participate in a grandiose cosmic project, it is a reason for being, of man as an awareness of the world”.
Mironescu believed that “in no other field of activity, more than that of science, has man, in his work, felt himself closer to God’s creative power”, but the Father knows well that there is also room for great dismay, for weakness can lead the spiritually unsophisticated astray: “For he may fall into the sin of pride and unwittingly, like a Luciferian intruder, think that he can substitute himself for the Creator”. In order to make things completely clear from the Christian point of view, a brief biblical (Acts 2:16-17; John 17:3) and patristic (St. John of Damascus) excursion will be made. John Damascus to show that the original warning not to eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was not intended to prohibit or limit knowledge, but only to warn against its possible misfortunes (“God wanted precisely to warn man against the inner division between good and evil, against the poisoned fruit of evil, which means sin, i.e. separation from God, evil, death”). As Mironescu observes, the secularisation of science is a foolish tendency and a consequence of the potential folly of the spirit of knowledge. The truly Christian position was captured and memorably articulated by Shakespeare in Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in thy philosophy”, or by a Leonardo da Vinci (“Behold, out of great knowledge springs great humility”), to remain in the cultural frame of reference. Not only does Mironescu deny the supposed incompatibility between faith and knowledge (including scientific knowledge), but he also admirably expresses his conviction that, without faith in general, fully defined and accepted, all knowledge is blind or inconsistent; in Christian terms, “if the gifts of the Spirit do not breathe on them”, all sciences “remain dead signs” (or, as Kepler said, we keep playing with symbols and end up forgetting that it is only a game…).
In the more detailed preface to The Limits of Scientific Knowledge, Father Mironescu considers that, after the long, despairing fashion of positivism, there are two realities that we must reaffirm above all today: that “the spirit is beyond matter and lies at its foundation” and that “beyond the spirit is the other world, the divine world, of origins, of information, of projects” (the uncreated divine Sophia, in more theological terms). Alexandru Mironescu’s thought (like that of Nicolae C. Paulescu in the past, but with more theoretical apparatus and in a language closer to that of the present moment) was shaped by these two fundamental truths, and its relevance and actuality can be seen in the fact that many philosophers and scientists after him have taken up and deepened similar concepts (this time they are Roger Sperry, Lyall Watson, Heinz Pagels, Niels Bohr and Victor Weisskopf – who also lectured in Bucharest in 1975 on “The Limits and Frontiers of Science”).
“Alexandru Mironescu’s book – concludes the father – is an impressive plea not only for the usefulness of the effort to think, but also for the joy that this act can bring to the mind and soul, which is indispensable to bring us closer to understanding the act of creation and, implicitly, the role of our being on Earth. In a century in which there has been either talk of the incompatibility of science and religion (extending it to the incompatibility of faith itself), or in which (semi-)scientific writings have been produced with the intention of discovering the “scientific” sources of the biblical text, in The Limits of Knowledge… we find a true communion of science and religion, in which faith (through revelation) comes to illuminate our knowledge, which is essentially one, just as God is one, whatever name we give Him”.
Perhaps Orthodoxy has never spoken more clearly about these delicate relations, and if in the indefinite future science comes ever closer to faith, then perhaps we will be more grateful than we are today to those who have never doubted for a moment that the great truths have their full place in our language and in our spirit, as a prophetic and redemptive gift of the times, which should lead us to dare to be more than we are…
(Răzvan Codrescu – Rost Magazine, no. 55, September 2007)