Together with my father, Dumitru Stăniloae

In the following, we will recount some of the memories of my father, stories that he either told us or that we experienced. Some chronological and other clarifications will be made only in cases where the writings published so far have committed errors and dilettantism too obvious to be ignored, because unfortunately they are not lacking in some biographical accounts. We regret, therefore, if there are inconsistencies with the statements of the biographers, in which case we may be guilty of a lack of scientific style, but we are trying to put into our lines a part of the love that we had for him and that he, Father Dumitru, had for us. And that is why we are confident that people, like God, will forgive us, taking into account the depth of our feelings… […]

Without knowing the exact dates, my father was born on 16 November 1903, in the commune of Vlădeni-Ardeal, Brașov County, the youngest son of Irimie and Reveca Stăniloae. (For a long time, throughout my childhood, my father spelled his name this way. Our family was also called “Stăniloae”. Later, in later years, my father added an “i”, saying it was more accurate. No wonder that on the covers of some books he appears like this, “Stăniloaie”) […].

Father Dumitru’s parents and childhood

He was a righteous man sir Irimie. He helped all the needy in the village. He carried wood to the poor widows who had no cattle in the yard. Perhaps because of the hard work in the forest, almost all the men in Vlădeni died young, so the number of widows was always high. The neighbours remembered him with admiration: “Hey, what a man sir Irimie was!” He often kept quiet, and when he did speak, he said things nicely, so more than a few people sought his wise counsel. My grandmother, on the other hand, was talkative and outgoing. They complemented each other perfectly and were very pious and devout. Nothing in the world would have made them miss church on Sundays, and in their home, as everywhere else in those days, all fasts were observed with sanctity. The only exception was when my grandfather cut up the pig at Christmas. My father loved to tell the story of how my grandfather, Irimie, after cooking and making sausages, would cut up the meat and put it in a big pot on the stove in the veranda. Tactically, as he did everything, without looking right or left. The children would peer from the corners in amazement at the pork stew, which smelled delicious, but they didn’t dare go near it because Grandma was watching. How could you eat meat during Lent? She herself would sit on the cot and watch the pot bubbling on the fire. When the stew was ready, Grandfather would take the pot, put it on the table and sit down quietly in front of her. “Come on, come on, it’s getting cold,” he said to the children, who didn’t let themselves be tempted twice. The grandmother had never tasted it and scolded her husband: “You heathen, you’re spoiling my children again!” The father confessed that he had never eaten anything tastier and that, after he had grown fatter, he had noticed how the grandmother would turn her head so that the others would not see her smile. But he never ate. […]

Like all the children in the village, my father went to school in Vlădeni. […] The children of different ages sat around and the teacher took turns to look after them. It seems that she was an exceptional teacher, with a remarkable pedagogical talent. From time to time she would hit them with her pen, rather symbolically, and then she would say to the offender: “Look, I’ll hit you!” “And we, we would pull our hand back or hide it under the sleeve of the blouse so that we wouldn’t feel much pain!” When I was little, I often asked my father if he was also punished. I found it fascinating: how, my father was a child like me? And that he had to slap his hand or sit on his knees on maize grains? It was more than I could imagine and I asked him, “Did he make you kneel?” Dad laughed and said he couldn’t remember, he probably did. Anyway, the child’s unusual intelligence caught the teacher’s attention and she insisted that sir Irimie send his youngest to school. It was not an easy matter. Few children went to high school in Brașov. Uncle Irimie was not rich. They needed money for books, clothes, a host in the city… But my grandmother insisted, and Dumitru’s fate was sealed. Coming from a family of priests herself, she insisted that the younger boy, for whom she had a particular weakness, should serve at the altar. […]

Outstanding student

The child Dumitru settled in easily and quickly at “Șaguna” High School in Brașov, a school with a great tradition, with eminent teachers and which has given many remarkable people to Romanian culture. He stayed with a host, Johann, in Ulița Lungă, where he slept on a bed in the kitchen. Under the bed he kept his books, clothes, bacon and bread, which he brought from home. From time to time, his grandmother would go to Brașov, on foot, how else, thirty kilometres through the snow, with a big pot of cabbage rolls, so that the boy would have enough to eat for a week. After a while, Stăniloae, an excellent student, received the “Emanoil Gojdu” scholarship, which was a material relief for the family.

Despite his shortcomings, my father had a wonderful time in Brașov and remembered his life as a high school student with great pleasure. He had really good teachers, and he told us especially about the Romanian language teacher, Nicolae Cristea, a great personality and an eminent teacher, whom he loved and admired immensely. […]

Biographical works have written about the short time my father spent at school. In fact, he took some private lessons during the summer, as he had gone to high school later. After a brilliant baccalaureate, it was time for my father to go to university.

Theology student

As I’ve said, there are many stories about his vocation to the priesthood. My grandmother wanted him to be a priest. So was his step-uncle, Father Jordan Curcubătă, whom I have just mentioned. So when he finished high school, both his mother and the priest from Budila insisted that my father study theology. There is no doubt, however, that as an independent and voluntary person he would not have done it just because of their insistence. Theology attracted him by the depth of its questions, beyond the immediate and strictly practical wisdom of men, or the formal logic which, unfortunately, for the sake of the instrument, often forgets what lies beyond it. […]

He had read a lot of philosophy, and a certain formalism of schemes for approaching problems did not satisfy him. His search led him to theology, and he felt that this was indeed his field of work. So he enrolled at the Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți, having obtained a scholarship through his uncle in Budila. Stăniloae’s family was not well-off, and without this support the years of study would not have been possible. Unfortunately, he did not find what he was looking for. Although the school was famous for its professors, true celebrities in the academic world, the methods of study and memorisation, which did not require the student’s creative contribution, turned him off. In history, only dates and events were memorised. […] Disappointed, my father went to Bucharest the following year, to the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, always in search of that fabulous field of absolute truth. After a year he returned to theology for good. Metropolitan Bălan welcomed him with open arms, did not reprimand him, but simply said: “I was sure you would come back”. He gave him back the scholarship for Cernăuți, because from the beginning he had sensed the exceptional value of the young man. […]

A friendship of mutual respect and admiration developed between the two men, which was only interrupted by Metropolitan Nicolae’s death in 1955. It was a great loss for the Church, which he served with dignity and devotion. And my father was robbed of a good friend who understood and stimulated him during all those years of the creative effervescence of youth, when a man is formed and his path in life is shaped.

In Cernăuți my father made lasting friends. Among those closest to him was Nicolae Popovici, the future Bishop of Oradea, a man of integrity and great courage, who was later unjustly slandered by some and others, slanderers of the faith […].

Doctoral student in Athens, with the future Bishop Nicolae Popovici

When he finished his studies, Metropolitan Bălan sent my father abroad to prepare his doctorate. [He stayed in Athens for a year and had a wonderful time; the Greeks were sociable, talkative and happy to teach foreigners their language. Together with Nicolae Popovici, they rented a small room in Eolu Street from a Romanian family. Athens was a poor city in those days. Old and small houses, cold huts in winter because there were no stoves, lots of rain. No food, nothing. “Get some grapes over there,” my father used to say. (In the language of the villagers, “râbghiță” means a tiny fish, the size of a finger). But the rock of the Acropolis was there, and the two doctoral students walked among the Parthenon’s columns every evening. […]

But Athens was much more than these memories. It was there that my father, who was fluent in both spoken and classical Greek, came across the ancient manuscripts in the National Library. There he came across the writings of the Holy Fathers, Dositheus of Jerusalem and Gregory Palamas. Above all, he began to discern what theology should really be and understood that his place was where God had led him, both straight and roundabout, as He always does with His chosen ones. […]

The manuscripts of the Holy Fathers had an enormous influence on his thought and work. The young man, who had just turned twenty-seven, was entrusted like no other with the task of translating and interpreting the rigorous thought of the Church Fathers. He encountered these treasures and never parted from them, remaining with them in close and unbreakable communion. Father Stăniloae not only translated and commented on the writings of the Philokalia, but he lived in the Philokalia spirit and they became his own model and way of life. Only such a total interweaving of thinking and living their spirituality could lead to such a unified, comprehensive and profound work. His family life was also imbued with this spirit, and no one can testify better than I to the exemplary manner of true Christianity in which he and his wife lived and worked together.

He spent some time in Paris and returned with photocopies of the original manuscripts of St. Gregory Palamas. They had their place on my father’s desk and I can only remember him in that spacious room in Sibiu, in Mitropoliei Street, bending over them and painstakingly unfolding them with a huge magnifying glass. […]

Finally, after several stops, including Belgrade, my father returned home for good. He was weak because he had been sitting in the sun on the banks of the Danube. But the spring weather was treacherous and he caught pneumonia. After a second bout of pneumonia, he often caught a cold and coughed all the time. As soon as it got cold, he developed bronchitis, a condition from which he was never completely cured. As soon as winter came, he started coughing again.

In 1928 he defended his doctorate with a thesis on the Patriarch Dosithei of Jerusalem, and in 1929 Metropolitan Bălan appointed him professor at the Theological Academy in Sibiu. He was not yet twenty-seven. At first he taught history, and when Professor Nicolae Colan was appointed Bishop of Cluj, he moved to the Dogmatic Department and took over the Rectorate. […]

An unexpected love story

It was at this time that he met my mother. We were very curious and I used to ask her: “How did you two meet? How did you meet my mother? How did you meet Dad?”

They would both smile. My mother told us that one of my father’s colleagues, Dr. Stăncioi from Cluj, asked her to take a letter to his friend in Sibiu. My mother was a first-year student at the Commercial Academy and was preparing to go home for the holidays. Stăncioi, a family friend of one of her mother’s cousins, told her that the sender was a university professor and that she would find him at the Theological Academy.

Conscientiously, her mother took the letter there, expecting to find a dull old gentleman, as professors were supposed to be. She rang the bell at the gate, the porter opened it, told her to wait, that Mr Stăniloae would be right there, and she couldn’t believe it when a handsome young man appeared, looking more like a student than a teacher. Her father read the letter and then asked her if she would like to go for a walk with him that afternoon.

A few months later they got married. Naturally, the event caused quite a stir in Sibiu’s social circles. Mr Professor was a much sought-after catch, and several of the city’s independent girls had set their eyes on him. They had wealthy, influential parents, a suitable dowry… When, lo and behold, Mr. Stăniloae married a student of modest origins from a peasant family with eight children. […]

Yes, my mother was very beautiful, you can see it in her photos from her youth. But I’m sure it wasn’t her beauty that attracted my father. She was above all a being of rare devotion, with a very just judgement and a strength of faith and love for others such as I have never known. She knew people well, had a sixth sense that never deceived her. Often when my father, in his good faith, would approach someone, my mother would say: “Leave him alone, Dumitre. He’s not human”. And unfortunately, she was right, because some of my father’s so-called friends did us a lot of harm. She stood by him all his life, supporting him, encouraging him, never losing her courage, even though she had so much trouble. She bore them all with patience, always humble and willing to sacrifice. My father often confessed that without her presence he would not have been able to carry out the great work in which she believed with the same firmness. Until their deaths, they were united by a strong love, and they really became one, as they say at the wedding. And they lived in a truly Christian spirit, of unfailing devotion to each other, to their children, to all those close to them, two personalities of great kindness and beauty of soul whose absence nothing can replace. […]

The first great joy and the first great drama of the Stăniloae family

After their marriage, they moved to a larger house in Carmen Sylva Street, as it was then called, at number 5. That’s where the twins were born, a boy and a girl. They were christened by Professor Loichiță, their godfather, and the whole family was overjoyed. [But the joy didn’t last long. After four and a half months, the little boy, who was a little frail, developed an intestinal infection and died. [They buried him in the cemetery of Sibiu. I still remember the simple cross with the inscription “Mituț Stăniloae”. I often went to the grave and always on Good Friday, when there was a vigil. [My father always sat upright, next to the cross. He took off his black hat, with its wide brim, which he had worn all his life, and looked at the inscription without saying a word. Later I began to understand the sorrow in his eyes and I felt very, very sorry for him. […]

I lived in the house on Carmen Sylva Street for several years. It was a beautiful, large two-storey house with three entrances, belonging to the Metropolitan Consistory. […]

In the house on Carmen Sylva lived many people with whom my parents had become friends and whom I also liked. I must say that this coincidence of opinions did not always work and I did not automatically like the same people, the whole family. My father in particular, with his extraordinary generosity, trusted people blindly. Everyone was good, everyone was kind. He was the quintessential critical mind when it came to theoretical matters, but he suddenly lost it in a surprising way when it came to people. That’s why he had great disappointments and great difficulties in life. […]

Rector of the Theological Academy in Sibiu 

In 1937, Metropolitan Bălan offered my father the post of Rector of the Theological Academy in place of Nicolae Colan, who had just been elected Bishop of Cluj.

We moved into our new home, the Rector’s house in the courtyard of the Academy, on Mitropoliei Street. It was later renamed 1 Mai Street, and I don’t know what it is called now […].

We lived in the house on Mitropoliei Street until the autumn of 1947, when we moved to Bucharest.

The parsonage was on the first floor, just above my parents’ bedroom. Early in the morning my father would get up and go to his office. It was a large, beautiful room that I loved very much. There was his desk, covered with dark green writing paper, always full of books: the volumes of Migne, the manuscript of St. Gregory Palamas… […] There was a complete mess on the desk, full of books, white papers and written papers. But my father found everything he was looking for, so he forbade anyone to touch it. “If you tidy up,” he said, “I won’t find anything.” […]

Almost an entire wall was taken up by the huge library, with three glass doors, crammed with books, magazines and manuscripts. There were books of philosophy and theology. […]

When I was older, I used to sit curled up in an armchair, knees to my mouth, reading while my father’s pen glided over the paper with that slightly squeaky, even sound so familiar to me… I lifted my head from the page, Dad was there, I could see his back, dressed in black cassock, bent over the desk. […]

I’ve never seen my father dressed in anything other than a cassock. A few days a year, when we went on holiday, he wore a black suit and it seemed very strange to me, as if he were someone else. In Sibiu, the imposing priest’s cassock looked different than in Bucharest. […] My father was very solemn in that attire. The students loved him and trusted him. They ran to the rector whenever they were in trouble and were always welcomed. He didn’t have office hours like teachers have today. They’d knock on the door, come in and Father would listen patiently: my mother had died and there was no money for the journey. They had no money for school fees. Dad took out his wallet. Another boy was getting married and had no godfather. My father and mother went to Cluj or Simeria or wherever and married him. Every problem was solved by the rector. But his very serious and upright behaviour, his great erudition and the high quality of his lectures made them respect and fear him. I knew many students. Almost all of them always came back to us when they finished their theological studies. They came from all over the country, some to ask for advice or help, others just to see him. They told me how my father would walk into the lecture hall, ask where they had been last time, and then begin to speak freely, no notes, no paper in front of him, as he walked: seven steps, always seven steps back and forth. “He said things so elevated that I didn’t always understand. But I felt it was something very beautiful, and I couldn’t wait for him to come to class again. I came to theology without much conviction. The rector made me understand that there is no more beautiful vocation than that of a priest,” a former student told me later. He never raised his voice or reprimanded them. “It was enough for him to look at you and you’d fall to the ground,” many of his former pupils later confessed. He didn’t fail his exams. Nevertheless, the students studied desperately, and after the dogmatic examination of the third year, they considered themselves almost graduates. […]

Founder of the Romanian Philology and Dogmatics

My father had already started translating the Philokalia in Sibiu. As there was no room at Uncle Nicolae’s house, he asked the village priest to give him a room in the parish cultural centre, and he wrote all day between dictionaries and papers. He would only come home for lunch and to bed at night, telling his mother with great satisfaction what a treasure he had found. We kept hearing about St. Anthony, Evagrius Ponticus and especially St. Maximus the Confessor.

As the translation progressed, the project of translating the Philokalia in its entirety began to take shape. “I will have many years to translate,” he said. “But what wonderful things are hidden there. It’s worth a lifetime’s work…”

He had taught dogmatics after Andrutsos’ course. Now he kept repeating: “I have to write dogmatics! Later I’ll write dogmatics. Only after reading the Holy Fathers can you write a dogmatic”. He was fascinated not only by the theological depth but also by the immense source of wisdom and balance in the thought of the Fathers. He took great pains to find suitable equivalents in the Romanian language, and indeed he found suitable expressions that became established in the theological language. In doing so, he discovered the infinite richness and the infinite possibilities of expression of our language. He liked expressions like “right account”, “trezvia” or the incomparable “cuminte”, which has no equivalent in other languages. […]

When my father arrived in Bucharest at the beginning of 1947, the fame of Philokalia had long preceded him. […] It was known in the intellectual circles of the capital, among the monks of Moldavia, everywhere. […]

The clouds of Bolshevism darken the future of the country and the Stăniloae family

On 6 March 1945, the government of Petru Groza was installed, “the first democratic government”, as it was emphatically called. He was venerated as “Daddy” or “Father of the People”, the one who used to sneer at us from posters, his hands up to his elbows in blood: “The butcher of Red Square…” Everything frightened us. Whenever we heard the word “comrade”, which used to be so warm, and which now had a meaning that frightened us, we saw huge, bloody hands in a sea of red. Terrible, terrible!

My father used to read from his book History of the (Bolshevik) Communist Party of the Soviet Union and shake his head. He predicted what would happen: “This is their tactic… They’re applying it to us.”

Then something happened that changed the whole course of our lives. My father’s two colleagues, who a few years earlier had walked around in green shirts with guns on their belts, became inspectors at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and advisers to Groza, his henchman.

Groza’s dislike and mistrust of my father had thus become even more intense, for the two of them could not forget that my father had once spoken strongly against priests with guns on their belts.

Thus, on 25 January 1946, the head of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet wrote to the Metropolitan asking him to remove Stăniloae from the rectorship, among other things because he was a mystic and allegedly had links with Crainic.

A few days later, my father resigned from the rectorship in writing, denying the accusations against him. The Metropolitan, however, kept him on, asking him to continue as rector in the hope that the storm would die down.

But whenever he went to Bucharest to see his master, Groza insisted that he had to remove my father. The Metropolitan always resisted, trying to buy time. In the end, Groza gave him a choice: either Stăniloae left, or the Institute was abolished.

The Metropolitan returned from Bucharest fuming and called my father to tell him about the discussion with Groza. There was nothing he could do anymore.

As it was already the end of the year, his official dismissal from the Rectorate did not take place until 1 September, when classes began. I will tell you more about this later. […]

In the summer, after a long time, we went to Vlădeni again. […]

My father had recovered somewhat. He tried to forget his worries, the uncertain everyday life that awaited him in Sibiu. He was like Antaeus, who regained his strength every time he came home. He wrote all day long, getting up early in the morning and writing with passion and eagerness, either in the tent or outside under the vine awning he had made.

He was in love with his work and talked incessantly about the texts of the Holy Fathers. He had begun the publication of that great work, the Philokalia.

He had reached the fourth volume and, although he did not know whether he would be able to continue publishing, he was working on it. “Let it be finished,” he said. “One day it will all be published.” He kept talking about St. Maximus the Confessor, telling us about him, and in a way he became part of our family. I expected one day to see him come out of the grove above the station and sit next to my father at the table full of books and dictionaries. I don’t think my father would have been at all surprised, for he had begun to live the writings he was translating; in any case, for him life had taken on a hitherto unknown dimension, and the Philokalia had changed him, given him a new perspective on existence, not only in his thinking but also in his daily life.

Earlier, in 1930, he had translated the Dogmatics of Andrutsos. Now he was rehearsing: “I have to write a new Dogmatics. A Dogmatics based on the theology of the Holy Fathers. And another book about Jesus Christ. The elements of Christology in the Philokalia are of a spiritual richness that no book of theology has yet reached”.

A few years earlier he had written Jesus Christ or the Restoration of Man. When I read it later and tried to fathom its depth, I wondered why he was no longer satisfied with it. It was of a subtlety of thought found in few theologians and philosophers, and I could not understand why he felt the need to write another. When, in the last years of his life, he also completed this project, I realised that he was right to want to do it. As he said, the subject is so inexhaustible that no matter how many volumes you write, you will never manage to say everything that can be said about it.

As for the project of writing a new dogmatic theology, this too has been accomplished. Today the three great volumes of the Orthodox Dogmatic Theology have been translated into many languages and constitute one of the fundamental theological works of our time. […]

We returned home in August. That evening Bucur, the Metropolitan’s servant, came and called my father “upstairs”. He stayed late, I went to bed and he still hadn’t come. The next day they were both worried. But with sadness and worry on everyone’s face, it didn’t seem unusual.

In the days that followed, my parents talked and talked. It was serious, no doubt. In fact, my mother once said to my father, “Well, is it possible that he’s not defending you at all? After all you’ve done for the Academy? “He does what he can,” my father replied. “He resisted as best he could. Groza put the knife to his throat!”

I didn’t understand what he meant. No one spoke well of Petre Groza. He had sided with the Communists, he had set up a regime that nobody wanted and that was only maintained thanks to Russian tanks. […]

My father wanted to go to Bucharest, but was prevented both by my mother’s opposition – “How can we move with a sick child?” – and the Metropolitan’s pleas.

In the meantime, Nicolae Chițescu’s chair had been taken. Now another chair had opened up, that of mysticism. Shortly after 23 August 1944, Nichifor Crainic was arrested, together with all the members of the Antonescu government, of which he had been a member for some time. He had been sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour, and his chair had been vacant for more than a year. Rumours of Groza’s antipathy towards my father, fuelled by his former colleagues Stan and Cândea, and of his intention to remove him from the Rectorate, had been circulating for some time. In 1946, before this had happened, the faculty in Bucharest proposed that he take up the vacant chair and thus leave the hornet’s nest of intrigues that had been woven against him.

My father was in a dilemma. He feared for his mother’s health, which had been shattered by Mioara’s death. He was also reluctant to take her away from her familiar surroundings and expose her to even greater stress in a completely different environment.

But it was my mother, who had always had a very strong sense of reality, who insisted that we go to Bucharest. “Here you’re in their way and they’ll arrest you soon. In Bucharest, they’ll lose track of you”. […]

My father didn’t think twice. He told the people of Bucharest that he had accepted the call, and at the beginning of 1947 he took up his post in Bucharest.

The Metropolitan was very bitter, but he didn’t say anything, he agreed with dad. He let us stay in the house until we could find something in Bucharest, and so something new, unknown in our lives really began.

A new beginning in the capital

The housing problem in the capital was truly insurmountable. For the time being, the only prospect of free accommodation was a half apartment in the church of St. George the Elder, which was due to be vacated in a few months. […]

After several refused requests for an audience [to obtain housing], my father made no further attempt to see the Patriarch. For years they met only from a distance, at various events of the Institute, when the Patriarch did not speak to him and simply pretended not to see him. Much later, in the last years of his pastorate, things changed somewhat. After my father came out of prison, after he was reinstated as a professor, after he achieved great international fame, the Patriarch’s behaviour lost some of its bitterness. But he never had any particular sympathy for my father.

So we remained in a half-way house. With the terrible crisis, there was no other solution for someone who had not been showered with money. […]

My father had started printing the Philokalia and had reached the fourth volume. He was having a hard time, there was no paper to be found, he was being hindered in every way. The books were printed in the archdiocesan press and bound in a workshop in the city.

It has now stabilised. Every adult citizen was apparently exchanged for one million, which meant nothing at the time of inflation. He received fifty lei. So we had a hundred lei. A few days earlier, when the rumour of imminent stabilisation had become a certainty, my father had received about eighty million for delivering a large number of books, a sum that should have been paid to him about six months earlier. The money had disappeared because it could not be exchanged.

The recipient later sold the books he had received as a gift. It wasn’t the first or last time that some people made a handsome profit from Dad’s work and he got nothing. It happened both before and after his death. And when we protested and tried to take action against the many scams, we were vilified and gossiped about in the dirtiest manner.

Most of the copies of the fourth volume that were in the bookbinder’s could not be bound because there was no more money. My father took some back as they were. After nationalisation, the remaining copies in the bookbindery were simply melted down. When we left for Bucharest, the rest were kept by various relatives and acquaintances.

Our only “fortune” was a so-called “house”, consisting of two dilapidated shacks on a narrow plot of land on which it would have been difficult to build a house. My father had bought it after printing Jesus Christ or the Restoration of Man.

The architect Borthmes had drawn up a plan and wanted to start building. But the tenant who lived there, a Swiss called Krauss, who paid an illusory rent, didn’t want to move in. He came over, banged his fist on the table and shouted, intimidating my parents.

The architect said to my father: ‘It’s all right, Father Rector, give me permission to start. I’m taking the roof off and they’ll have to move. I’ve never heard anything like that since I’ve been an architect!” But my father didn’t want to: “How can I demolish the roof when there is a family with children living there? I’m a priest, I can’t do that!”

Then the war started, Mioara fell ill, the hard times came after 23 August, and after my father’s arrest everything was confiscated.

So we gathered the few things we had. The old furniture, my mother’s dowry, my piano, which my father had bought at a good price from a fellow countryman, Mr Stefan from Brașov, whose wife had died and he couldn’t do anything with it…

Since the space in Bucharest was much smaller and we didn’t have the money to pay for two transports, my father donated the library, his precious books, to the library of the Theological Academy. Not long afterwards we were told that they were lying in the mud in the courtyard, so that the dust had got on them. […]

Between the modesty of home and the opportunities of the city

Our new home was in a small courtyard. Where was our big yard in Sibiu? On the left the church, on the right a dwarf house, low under the low floor that seemed to flatten it. Then our house. Dad got down from the furniture and showed me the windows: “This is where we’ll live!” I was too tired to be disappointed. […] They made wood fires in the terracotta stoves, and when the cold set in, I remembered with nostalgia our heated rooms in Sibiu. Here I shivered to get dressed, I shivered in the bathroom where the fire was lit once a week, I shivered everywhere. Wood was expensive, apart from the “quota”, and my father tried very hard to buy “free”, or at least “waste”, which really meant some chips mixed with dust and sawdust. He would then put charcoal on top of the wood, and the whole place had a dark and unventilated smell, even though we shivered for several hours a day with the windows open. […]

Dad, on the other hand, loved the vibrant atmosphere of the big city. It was full of interesting, cultured people with interests that brought him closer to it. Perhaps because of the trials he had just begun to experience, perhaps because of the terrible threat that hung over us, Bucharest society was about to lose a certain air of frivolity. Many of the most distinguished intellectuals had begun to turn to God. And they discovered, to their surprise, that this did not mean “a few uncultured priests singing beautiful hymns, coliva and memorial lists”, but something else, an unknown aspect of life, fundamental, existential problems, borderline situations, which verve and superficial brilliance could not solve. […]

As many said, the printing of the four volumes of the Philokalia had borne fruit. Many interesting people came to see us, discussing new subjects with my father that I had never heard of. I would sit in a small corner of my room, which was also the reception room, and try to understand what they were talking about. I heard new words like “apophatic”, “uncreated light”, “kenosis”, “prayer of the heart”.

Among the most special people I met were Father Benedict Ghiuș, my father’s assistant at the university, Ștefan Todirașcu, and especially the poet Vasile Voiculescu. […]

Translating the Philokalia with frozen fingers

My father had set up his desk, covered with green post-its, in front of the bedroom window. In fact, there were three windows in the corner, overlooking the whole courtyard. There was a bit more light there. He was writing, swaddled and felted, dressed in an old, very thick, rough monk’s cloth with a pointed cut. His mother had knitted him a woollen cap, and so he sat for hours, translating from the Philokalia, making notes, commentaries, writing the course on asceticism and mysticism. Occasionally he would get up and walk around the room. The room was too narrow for his seven steps, and one had the impression that he was turning in a cage. He would open the stove door to see if the coals were lit, blow on his frostbitten fingers, and then sit back down at the desk.

“One day they’ll be published,” he said. The prospect of being able to print was receding further and further into dreamland. As did the desire to move to a bigger, warmer flat with running water in the kitchen. He tried several times to get an audience with the patriarch. There were parish houses with free accommodation. But he was never received. As I said, the Patriarch didn’t have time. So Stăniloae never found another place to live and he stayed there for almost thirty years, until he managed to buy the two small rooms in Strada Cernica. […]

When we got tired of carrying water in buckets up and down the cellar stairs, when we couldn’t feel our frozen fingers, my mother would say: “Why don’t you go back to the patriarch? Maybe he’ll give you a place to live!” “Go to what?” my father would reply. “Haven’t I been so many times? You know he won’t take me in! We’ll stay here, there’s nothing to do!” So we got used to the idea that we’d stay there. […]

In fact, my father was content with very little. It was good if he had a desk, paper, ink and a holster. Then everything was fine. His contentment was complete when he was able to buy a few shelves for the books that were beginning to pile up again.

“That’s how cursed we are,” he smiled. “Wherever we go, the books pile up behind us…”

He wrote late into the night with pen and pencil. All our attempts to persuade him to use a pen failed. At first he tried, very willingly, but he wrote flat, a little to one side, and the pen splashed ink all over the paper. After a few days, the nib was permanently faded and my father threw the pen away, angrily saying, “This is no good either. Pen and ink is better.”

His old “pen” (he never said “quill”) was the best. “Too bad pens aren’t what they used to be,” he said wistfully. So the whole family was always on the lookout for pens. Sometimes a stash of stronger pens would turn up, and then Dad would be happy. “Well done, now that’s what I call a pen!” […]

But in addition to the spiritual joys and the deep mystical overtones that enriched his work, Dad’s orientation in this direction caused him a lot of trouble.

“Mystic” at the Theological Institute

Even within the Theological Institute he encountered much misunderstanding. The reputation he had made for himself, the love and admiration of his students, who filled his lecture hall to overflowing, aroused the envy of some professors. They began a systematic campaign against him, calling him a “mystic”. Anyone who lived through those times knows how dangerous the word “mystic” sounded during the communist regime. They didn’t even know what it really meant, because if they had, they wouldn’t have considered it synonymous with ‘subversive, dangerous to communist society’.

To be a mystic had overnight become synonymous with being the greatest “enemy of the people”, ready to overthrow the regime, to conspire against it and to commit many other atrocities… It is with pain that I have to say that, although the consequences of this fact were well known, some of my father’s colleagues did not hesitate to describe him as such, eagerly peddling all sorts of words that inevitably reached the ears of those who were specially prepared to listen and feed the regime’s aggressive ignorance with unbelievable malice. […]

My father was very worried and distressed. In addition to the adversities that Romanian society had to endure at the hands of a reign of terror, he also had to endure the envy and intrigues that flourished in the Teachers’ Chancellery, which had such painful consequences a few years later.

Many of the old teachers had retired, others had come in, less on the basis of professional merit, who had completely changed the atmosphere of study and the intellectual attitude of the past.

Slowly my father became more and more suspicious of state authority, although he had never been politically active. The sobriquet “mystic” was written on his forehead, and it was only a small step from there to being a conspirator against state security.

Obviously not everyone in the institute had this inhumane and unchristian attitude. […]

That’s the way I went for several years. There were few pleasant memories of that time. Among them are the days when my father would go to the antique shop and come back with a suitcase full of books for me. […]

Another step down into hell

We tried to live in a way that made us forget the storms outside. It wasn’t always easy. Dad would read the paper every day and I’d see him worried after the news. I remember how upset he was when the King abdicated. It was around New Year’s Eve and we were invited to the Mereuță family in the Iancului district. We took the tram to get there. The people on the street were restless, you could feel it. Everyone had a newspaper in their hands. It seemed to me that a special edition had just been published and the nervousness was extreme. We were sad and frightened all evening. All they talked about was the abdication. We’d taken another step down into hell…

The conferences in Antim had stopped. People were afraid to meet, spoke in hushed tones, always looking behind them to see if anyone was spying on them. […]

Paradoxically, one could still speak of a stabilisation, a resettlement, albeit a malevolent one. And in these times of sad memory, things were beginning to take on a patina of normality. The new ruling class had amassed absolute power. It was entering a kind of normality, as rough as the initial period, but with less turmoil. We had become accustomed to daily terror. We had learned our lesson. We didn’t talk about what we shouldn’t, where we shouldn’t, to whom we shouldn’t, and as long as you played by the rules, you were left alone. Those who had paid for their past had paid. Those who, like my father, were potential enemies because they rose above the general mediocrity and believed in something different were looked down upon with suspicion.

At the Institute, some still called him “the mystic”, “the navel-gazer”, which could not have been a reason for sympathy from the authorities. A kind of status quo was maintained, just as when the hunter patiently waits for the game to come out of hiding, he commits the slightest imprudence… […]

After the educational reform, the asceticism and mysticism department was abolished. My father was given a chair of dogmatics and symbolism for doctoral students.

The existing textbooks on dogmatics were old, outdated. As I said, a group of Dogmatics professors, of which my father was a member, prepared a Dogmatics which appeared after his arrest in 1958. But his desire was to write a great treatise, a comprehensive dogmatics, now that he had penetrated to the heart of the writings of the Holy Fathers. So he began to think about how to write it.

At first he conceived it as a course for his doctoral students. Later it became a huge work, in three volumes, and went far beyond the character of a purely didactic course. He worked on it for many years. It was only in 1980 that it could be printed, and it has become a reference work in dogmatic theology, translated into German and English (an Italian translation is being worked on and will be reprinted in the United States), which is read everywhere with the same interest as the original. […]

When my father was arrested, some of the other detainees did not resist the interrogation and confessed, as they used to say at the time, what they had done, what they had not done and what they would not even think of doing. So in this batch, as in others, there were people who could not be accused of anything. But that was not important. As the lawyer told us on the day of the trial, after he had been allowed to look at his father’s file for a few moments: He’s innocent, he’ll get five years. And so it was.

Dad never blamed them, nor did he reproach them. The methods of investigation were too draconian not to break human resistance. Whole nations could not resist, not to mention individuals. […]

In any case, my father did not come out of prison in a rage or with a desire for revenge, like so many others. There is no denying that they were right. But he came back as calm, peaceful, at peace with himself and others, as he had left. He told us things, but with detachment. He had forgiven everything.

He spoke of one of the guards who had been particularly cruel to them: “He was devilishly mean, he took pleasure in torturing us. What an unhappy man!” Or of some of his fellow prisoners: “My God, they were worse than the guards! How they must have suffered to be like that!” and shaking his head pitifully.

Mostly, he would talk about the wonderful people he had met there, how much faith he had gained in human nature after meeting some extraordinary people whom he remembered fondly all his life. […]

The serious illness of his wife, the man behind Stăniloae’s work

In the summer of 1953, my mother fell ill again. She was coughing until she fainted, she was always feverish and she had become like a shadow. My father took her to all the doctors. They all said the same thing: cavern. […]

Our life had become a nightmare. It was hell, of course. To have no hope, to see no way out of despair. My father went on and on. He’d sit down at his desk, get up and walk around the house. The bedroom was too small. Sometimes I’d catch him kneeling before the icons. I’d tiptoe out and close the door. Then he’d go to the hospital. He’d come home, he’d go to class, he’d go back to the hospital. At home he’d walk back and forth and go to the hospital. […]

After my mother’s operation, they told me that they had lived with the nightmare that I would get sick too. Now I found out how much she had suffered from having to stay away from me, from us, always haunted by the terrible spectre of illness.

She went to her sister in Sibiu for convalescence. Her three missing ribs sometimes caused her great pain in her chest. Especially in her old age, when she had lost a lot of weight. But she never complained. She always bore her suffering with serenity, manliness and resignation, knowing that all trials come from God as a ransom for sins.

She was the most extraordinary person I have ever known, a woman of deep religiosity, which she lived in a concrete, modest and unostentatious way, with a discretion and balance that only truly great souls possess. Without their absolute devotion, without their daily support, my father would not have been able to carry out his enormous work. He has said it many times and I will say it again, at the risk of repeating myself. She instilled in him confidence and courage, urging him to write, to work, to understand the value and importance of his achievements. In fact, the two of them formed a whole in which they complemented each other wonderfully, going through a life that did not spare them, that was never easy, with a pure heart, with the awareness that each lives for the other and for others. And when my father died, so long after my mother had left this world of ours, I understood that it couldn’t be otherwise. All that was best in him had gone with my mother, his strength, his support, his will and his courage to live.

The time after my mother’s operation was quieter, at least in appearance. The terrible spectre of illness was gone.

Everything had fallen into a routine of lies and suspicion. We kept our mouths shut and stopped expecting miracles. My father continued to write, about Jesus Christ, about the Liturgy, about the Mother of God: “Once and for all, they’ll come out…”

On the other hand, the situation in the Institute had become a little clearer. To be precise, the animosities, the enmity, had been resolved. My father had got used to the pious looks and whispered words behind his back, as far as one can get used to them. He also had colleagues who cared for him, respected him and didn’t mind his growing fame. He had his PhD students, whom he cared about very much. He was always passionate about his work in the department and he enjoyed contact with young people. […]

The Hungarian Revolution. The screw tightens in the country

After a while, the storm broke: there was a revolution in Hungary. We listened anxiously to the radio for the latest news. My father shook his head: “The screw will tighten again!”

He had recently been working hard on his dogmatics course, prepared by a team of teachers. He was in a hurry, as if he’d been rushed: “Let’s get it done.” He made the corrections and then breathed a sigh of relief. As if he’d sensed something…

In recent years, many had returned from prison: broken, unrecognisable, but they had come back. They were the lucky ones. Others never came back.

This was the case, for example, with our neighbour, the engineer Nițulescu, a nice, polite man. They took him away one night and nobody ever heard from him again. […]

After the meeting in Kogâlniceanu Square, they started to find scapegoats. Overnight we heard about this one who had ‘disappeared’. Or we didn’t see him anywhere. The ranks of my medical student friends had swelled.

From time to time we’d visit the family of the architect Joja. Since his brother Athanase, the professor of philosophy, was the second-highest ranking member of the Central Committee and a great dignitary, we thought he was less suspicious. Codin Mironescu used to come there, the two families were very close friends, Father Agaton, sometimes Father Ghiuș and Father Sofian. All of them had been part of the “Burning Bush” in Antim. Other very rare visitors were Doctor Dabija from the Faculty of Medicine, Paul Sterian, Vasile Voiculescu and others. We discussed philosophy, theology and literature. My mother was very worried. “Let’s not go,” she said. “We can’t, I promised,” my father replied with his eternal good faith. “What are you so worried about? We’re not talking about anything forbidden, anything subversive. And they’re still brothers, for God’s sake. Athanase Joja won’t let anyone touch his brother. And we, who are in their house, can’t be suspected of anything…”.

A few months after the uprising was crushed, the number of arrests was even higher than before. There was hardly a house where at least one inhabitant hadn’t been “taken”.

With the exception of the hostess, everyone who had taken part in these friendly gatherings was arrested. One by one. […]

Arrests begin in the Burning Bush

In the spring of 1958, the first people were arrested, forming the group we have been talking about, which some called the “Burning Bush group”. One morning, a few weeks before Easter, Mrs Mironescu came to visit us. It was the first time I saw her, unshaven, unkempt, with a yellow face and tearful eyes. The secret police arrived late in the evening, after eleven, as usual. They searched the house and took Mr Mironescu away. Then, after about an hour, they came back and arrested Șerban, who was studying classical philology. […]

Easter passed. Nothing happened and we calmed down, at least on the surface. We kept waiting for the Mironescu couple to be released. They were not released. Instead, they arrested Dr Dabija. His assistant from the university came and told us. He appeared very seldom, even more seldom than we did, both at the Mironescu family and at Joja’s. Slowly, slowly the circle was closing. Sandu Tudor, Father Agaton, Father Ghiuș, Father Sofian were arrested one after the other…

In the summer my parents went to Rohia, where I was to meet them, as I had only been able to take a week’s holiday. […]

After the four days I could stay, I went to Bucharest and they went to Vlădeni. […]

Finally, Father Dumitru was arrested.

At the beginning of September I took my leave and went to Vlădeni to meet them. We stayed together for one more day and the next day, in the evening, they went home. I drove them to Brașov and waited for the train to leave. I saw them for a moment at the window, we all waved and the train started to move. They arrived home on the 3rd of September. The next day, the night of 4 September, my father was arrested. […]

I don’t remember how we got off the train, how we got home. The door was unlocked, as it had never been before. I entered the house and told myself that my father must have returned by now. It was an indescribable mess. Books thrown on the floor, Dad’s manuscripts, papers trampled underfoot. Mum tried to tidy up, but to no avail. She’d pick up a book, put it on the couch and cry… Cupboard doors were wide open, desk drawers pulled out and thrown on the floor. There were shoe prints and mud marks on the torn pages.

I sat down next to her on the sofa, put my arm around her neck and started sobbing. Then she told me how they came in at night around eleven. They knocked on the bedroom window and when Dad looked out to see who it was, they shone a bright torch in his eyes.

“There were four of them,” my mother said. “No, there were more than one. Some came and some went. It was a constant coming and going. But four stayed the whole time. They started rummaging around, throwing the written pages and books on the floor, stepping on them viciously”.

“What do you need so many papers for?” one of them shouted at my father. “What are you doing with all these papers, only suitable for kindling a fire?”

“I’m a teacher and that’s what I do for a living,” he replied. “I write books and give lectures to students. It could not be done without books.”

No, he was calm, my mother answered my question. He was calm and answered without fear, with dignity. But the books on the floor made him sick. My father, who could not bear to see a book lying around carelessly!

They rummaged until about four in the morning. Then they left. They took my father and left. There was a black car waiting at the gate. Mum looked out of the window, even though they had threatened her: “If you look out of the window, we’ll come and get you too!” She saw Dad put on dark glasses. One of them took him by the arm and pushed him into the car. Like a villain.

The trial. “He’s innocent. He’ll get five years.”

We wondered what to do. Mum kept hoping they’d let him go. “No way, it’s a misunderstanding. He’s innocent, they can’t hold him for nothing…” But we still needed a lawyer. And we didn’t know any.

[Through the engineer Dinu we found another lawyer, Vladimir Boantă. A good man, brave, with character. He immediately agreed to defend my father. We paid him again, but this time it was easier to do it at the bar.

A few days later, Boantă told us: “I’ve seen his file. He’s innocent. He’ll get five years”.

He tried to change it to another article of the law, something like “defamation of the socialist regime”. I don’t remember those absurd and pompous phrases. I was far too desperate and felt I was living in an endless nightmare. He didn’t succeed.

“It’s a farce, ma’am,” he told my mother. “The trial is over. We’re just here as a formality. You have to accept that. The Father professor is going to be convicted anyway.”

No, my mother could not accept the idea and refused to understand why an innocent man should be convicted. She hoped in the end. In vain, of course. […]

The severity of the sentence was extreme. I didn’t understand why. […] After the verdict, my mother was desperate. She believed, she wanted to believe, that my father would be released ‘because he was innocent’. She couldn’t accept the idea that for the regime no one was innocent. The concept of innocence did not exist. Everyone was guilty, and evidence to the contrary was inadmissible. It was just that some were ‘in’ and some were ‘out’, which was really still a kind of prison.

“He hasn’t done anything, he’s innocent, they have to let him go!” she kept repeating. I tried to console her: “Think about it, five years goes by quickly. But what about those who get twenty years? What will their families say?” […]

Lecturer at the Aiud University

Once, almost four years later, I heard from my father. One day we met a young stranger who wanted to talk to us. Frightened, I invited him into the house. Any stranger who came to our house was a threat, especially after the harsh experiences we had had at that time. Not once had I been questioned at the police station, at the prosecutor’s office… He made sure that there was no one else present, introduced himself and told us that he had been released a few days earlier.

“I stayed in a room with Father Stăniloae,” he told us. “He is a wonderful man and we became friends. He gave us theology classes. Others gave language courses, philosophy, each according to his speciality. I learnt English there and now, if I could, I would like to study philology. Father taught me a lot and I owe him a lot. He asked me to look you up and tell you that he is well and that he misses you very much. Don’t worry, it was his faith that kept him going. He kept his spirits up and was a great help to many of us there. He always talked about you and was terribly sorry that you were in trouble because of him.

He was a handsome young man, very pale, very thin, with a quiet, serene face that impressed us. We thanked him heartily for the good news he had brought. When he returned, I asked my father about him. His face lit up: “Yes, of course, what a wonderful boy! He and Sandu Munteanul, what a chosen soul! They were always with me, Sandu mended my socks and shirts. He used to say: “Father, it’s okay, leave it to me, you don’t know how.” He looked after me like his own father. They were both very much loved, they brightened our lives there”. […]

Family at home, between humiliation and hope

Christmas is over. My first Christmas without my father. Sad, grey, an ordinary day like any other. That was the way holidays and Sundays were in those days. You expected nothing special, life had no sparkle, no charm, no solemnity. You didn’t expect any miracles. […]

The winter of 1963 finally came. It was December, cold and snowy. […] News began to circulate that filled us with fear. They said they were going to start releasing political prisoners. I had even heard of a few cases, of some who had come home. I didn’t know any of them and I didn’t know if it was true or if they were just telling stories as usual. We listened with excitement and didn’t dare hope. Anyway, we were calmer and no longer impressed by Priestess Petrescu’s curses whenever she passed by on the stairs and knew we could hear her. Especially my mother, who stayed at home all day, was very afraid of her. Now she could take it without caring and would go out into the yard with the bucket of dirty water to flush it down the drain (we didn’t have running water in our “kitchen” and if we flushed it down the toilet Mrs Frangu would get angry) without checking that Mrs Petrescu wasn’t on the balcony shouting at her.

Those were dark years when my father was away from us. Before that, he was always there, in the modest, cold little rooms at 36 Calea Moșilor. He would sit at his desk and write, deep in thought but present. He always had time.

You knew you had someone who could give you advice, someone you could trust. He would gently suggest a solution and leave you with the impression that you had actually got yourself out of trouble.

The fact that he was firm in his convictions gave me great confidence. The fact that he took seriously what he believed and preached “I am a priest, I must act like a priest” was a moral support for me, a certainty. But at the same time he had a sincere, natural, unassuming warmth and gentleness that warmed the heart. I had always known him like that and it seemed natural. Now we were suffering because we missed his kindness, his sharing of our lives, our joys, our sorrows. And, I repeat, we missed the days of celebration. That indescribable feeling of greatness, of beauty, of specialness, that warmed the heart and filled one with enthusiasm! Every feast day, every Sunday, was different from every other day. They were days when no one was sad, no one was sick, no one cried. No one had any reason to be sad, to be sick, to cry.

I’m curious how much my father’s presence influenced those days. And how different the Liturgy was when he was there. He was not a good cantor, but the Liturgies he celebrated were the most beautiful I have ever attended.

It’s true that in Ardeal the emphasis was less on the singing, on the voice of the priest, than on the content of the Mass, on the homily. “If they had to judge me in theology by my voice, I would never have graduated it,” my father used to say. “Liturgy is prayer, recollection, preaching, not an opera show…”

A stranger announces a great joy

So we waited eagerly, not daring to hope. Then, one morning in January, at about four, the phone rang. We were startled, of course, and my mother picked up the phone with some trepidation.

“I have good news,” a voice said. It wasn’t very audible, it was calling from a populated place with a lot of background noise. “I wish to announce a joy. Your husband will be home soon.”

My God! Mother began to cry. Really? Soon? When?

– Very, very soon. Are you well, healthy, both of you?

– Yes, yes, we’re fine, us and the baby.

– Oh, you have a baby?

– Yes, yes, I have a grandchild…

The stranger hung up and we didn’t know what to think.

– Who was it? You didn’t recognise the voice?

No, no, she didn’t. The noise was loud and the man spoke softly.

“Was it a bad joke? Someone making fun of us?” No, it couldn’t be. No, it had to be someone recently released from prison, like the young man who had come to us months before.

I couldn’t sleep. We were too excited. Surely dad was coming soon… About a quarter of an hour later the phone rang again. It was the stranger again:

– I wanted to tell you that your husband will be coming very, very soon.

– Soon? my mother asked hopefully. My God, how soon?

– Mărioara, don’t you recognise me? It’s me.

My mother began to cry again:

– Dumitre, Dumitre, is that you? Where are you? Are you free?

I snatched the phone out of my mother’s hand:

– Dad, Dad, where are you?

– North station.

– We’re coming to get you. Stay there, I’ll be right there, the tram lines have changed and you don’t know how to get there…

– I’ll manage. You don’t have to come, I’ll manage.

– Do you have money for a ticket?

– Yes, yes, don’t worry.

We sat at the window. Time stood still. “I had to go to the station,” I said. “I had to welcome him”.

Finally, time decided to pass and, even sooner than I had hoped, I saw Dad’s tall figure in his broad-brimmed hat enter the gate. He had a small ball in his hand.

We ran out and hugged each other, crying. It was cold and the icy snow crunched under our feet. My God, what happiness! What a beautiful morning!

– Come and have some tea, warm yourself up, you’re cold. And hungry.

– No, we didn’t eat on the train.

They’d given them tickets, some food and a few lei for the tram. He proudly showed us a piece of bread, which he took out of his little bag as if it were something precious.

– They gave us bread, he said, in a tone of voice that would have declared he had been given a diamond.

We began to talk. All at once. I told him briefly about the ordeal we had been through. How I got married, how I had to get divorced.

Dumitraș was fast asleep in his cot. He was a beautiful, chubby child with long, girlish eyelashes. Sleep had made him sleepy, and he held Martinică, the big teddy bear, close to him.

“What a beautiful child! He’s like an angel!” Later my father told us that it was the happiest moment of his life and that seeing the baby had made him forget all the terrible years he had lived through.

I told him his name was Dumitru Horia and Dad started to cry.

– I’m not going to pick him up and wake him up. I’ll wait until later…

Yes, that was my father. The others were more important and he only thought of them.

– Why didn’t you say on the phone that you were coming? I asked.

– I was afraid you’d get too excited. For you not to have a shock, Mărioara, a heart attack.

She arrived around midnight and waited quietly at the station until dawn, so as not to frighten us, not to make us nervous… Then he prepared my mother… God, what a man he was!

He drank a cup of coffee with milk and kept saying, “Oh, it’s so good!”

We talked and talked, and it seemed that words couldn’t say what we wanted them to say.

This morning Dumitraș woke up. His mother went to his cot:

– Tataș, Tataș (that’s what he called himself and that’s what we all called him). Come and see! Daddy’s here!

Dad was sitting next door and the child asked him:

Yes? Are you from out of town?

That’s what his mother had told him when, looking at his father’s photo, he asked: “Who’s this guy?

– Big Daddy.

– Where is he?

– He’s out of town.

Now he’s here!

“God, what wonderful days those were!”

Daddy took him in his arms, Daddy put his hands around his neck and from that moment on, no one separated them. He clung to Daddy like a puppy. Wherever he went, the little boy followed. Even in the bathroom, Dumitraș waited quietly outside the door and didn’t move. From time to time he would ask: “Dad, aren’t you going to leave?” He was moved to tears and put his little hand in Dad’s, a gesture of trust and love that surprised us. He just hadn’t seen it before and wasn’t used to it.

He trotted softly alongside Daddy’s big strides, each struggling to keep up with the other. God, what wonderful days those were! Even Sundays began to look like Sundays. Daddy went to morning Service and didn’t stop looking for the scissors.

He’d come clean-shaven, without a beard or moustache. Dumitraș had asked him that very day: “Don’t you have a beard?” He knew from the photo that my father had a beard! Dad laughed: “Don’t you like it without a beard?” “No,” the child replied very seriously. “Well, I’ll have one soon.” A little later we were walking and Dumitraș was looking closely at dad’s golden vestments. He’d got used to seeing him at the altar after the first time he’d pointed: “There’s big daddy!”

Sometimes he’d doze off in my arms. When we got home, he’d ask Daddy questions that all started with “What does it mean? “What is eternity?” or “What is philosophy?” Dad would laugh and try to explain, admitting it wasn’t easy.

Two days later he went to see the Patriarch. He finally saw him after so many years and told him that he couldn’t reinstate him in his former position. “Maybe something in the archdiocese”.

Father was very bitter. “How can I sit on your head? How can I live on your back? He must give me a job!” […]

[After his release] he watched a lot of television, curious, eager to find out what else was out there. I was happy that we could have our own TV just then. But most of all he liked to walk around. He walked a lot, he needed to get out, to move around. With Dumitraș by his hand, he walked in the park, through the quiet streets of St Stephen’s.

Prison memories 

Whenever he returned home, he would buy bread.

“Dumitre, don’t always bring bread,” his mother used to say. “It dries up.”

“Never mind,” he’d reply.

They’d missed bread for years. They’d been fed “polenta”, a kind of dried maize meal. When, towards the end of their captivity, they were given a raw onion, it seemed like imperial food. “I’ve never eaten anything better,” my father said with a smile.

He told us more about his years in prison. He kept a lot of things secret, he didn’t want us to know how much he suffered.

Sometimes nice people would come into the room. Then they would get on very well, each giving a lecture in his own field, and life would become bearable. But other times…

“I once had a roommate who caused us more trouble than the guards. It was hell on earth…” he said, shaking his head.

During the day they had to sit upright on the edge of the bed. From time to time the guards would peek through the bean slot and woe betide anyone who didn’t comply. If they leaned just a little against the wall, their neighbour would knock on the door and turn them out. Then they were immediately sent to isolation.

We asked him, but he didn’t want to give us his name…

He told us what happened to an acquaintance of ours, a priest in Cluj. He used to take them to the cold showers and back in winter, in a terrible frost. The man got meningitis and died in terrible pain. For several days he howled in pain and the other prisoners kept knocking on the door, demanding medical attention. By the time they got him out, it was too late.

My father had a hernia operation in the prison infirmary. There was no anaesthesia, no narcotics.

The hardest time was in the Securitate headquarters on Uranus Street. They kept him there in a windowless cell with only electric light. “My mouth was so bitter and dry that my lips and tongue swelled up. After a few weeks he was moved to another cell with a ray of light coming from outside. “What a great thing the sun and its light are,” my father said, and he never tired of walking around.

In Aiud he had spent some time with Father Ilarion Felea from Arad, who had died in prison. Then with Father Sofian, with Father Benedict Ghiuș, with Grigore Popa. For a while he lived with Petre Pandrea. The latter had a sparkling verve and spoke with passion: “Father Stăniloae, Father Stăniloae, let the bastards take the man’s cow out of the barn!” He was a vehement opponent of collectivisation. After he was released, he would sometimes come to my father’s house and talk about the same thing. He knew how important the village was for the survival of our people and was still disturbed by its systematic destruction. My father shared this view.

From time to time we would go to Carol Park, then called Liberty Park, and my father would take Dumitraș for a boat ride, much to his delight.

One day we passed a bench where an elderly couple were sitting. The man looked at my father for a long time, a little disturbed, and then turned away. After we had turned away, he said, “Did you see him? He was one of our guards. One of the nicer ones, actually. I would have talked to him if he hadn’t pretended not to see me”.

At one point they brought a rabbi into the room. “I have never met anyone who prayed with such force. Really earnestly,” my father said. He was very impressed. “It was a real battle with the angel, like in the Old Testament. I have rarely seen such strong conviction, such fiery faith. Extraordinary!”

He had been questioned with great severity, especially about some of the young men who, as I said, visited him with some zeal, and Dad claimed that he had only met them occasionally, that he had had no contact with them.

“Did they beat you?” I asked him. “No, no,” Dad replied hastily, changing the subject. I never found out if they had beaten him during the investigation. (I recently read the account of someone who saw him in prison. He didn’t know him personally, he only saw Stăniloae from a distance when they brought him in one day, beaten, from an interrogation. Maybe, I don’t know. It’s not out of the question. But I have not heard any other testimony of this kind. But it’s certainly possible.)

Father Stăniloae, an incurable nobleman

He always smiled when he told us about his years in prison. As I have said, the extreme suffering he went through was an experience that brought him even closer to God. He endured it all with that exemplary patience with which he had endured so many other hardships. He bore no grudge against those who made him suffer, nor against those who, although they owed him so much, turned their backs on him. He remained firm in his convictions, he never lost faith in God, and he went through this hell with a radiant smile on his face and with the certainty that the Lord gives us trials to purify us, to acquire future life, which requires effort and a strong will.

He suffered especially for us, thinking that we had gone through so much because of him. This tormented him in prison and afterwards, when he reproached himself, although he had no reason to do so, that, for example, my career or my private life had suffered. That my mother had to face the hostility of others. As if it was her fault. As if she could divert from us the terror that silenced us all. Time and again, we both told her that she was not responsible, that everything that had happened was inevitable, sooner or later. But he always felt responsible, because he couldn’t alleviate the unhappiness, the sadness of others. And he suffered for it, generously overcoming his own suffering.

Not even the other side of people that he had seen during the years of hardship changed him. We too had this sad experience, all of us who were left behind. We carried not only the burden of grief and concern for our loved ones suffering in prison, but also the burden of the humiliation and ostracism that many of us felt on a daily basis. As someone who believed in the infinite solidarity of human beings, this sudden change of attitude disturbed me immensely. At first it seemed incredible, a nightmare that would disappear with the dawn. No, it was reality. Later, after my father’s release, we had a long talk. She shook her head: “My God, how painful it is to go through such an experience!” And, as I said, he felt guilty that I had lived it “because of him”. No, it wasn’t bravado. It was the absolute sincerity of his belief in humanity. […]

Until his death he couldn’t believe that some people don’t say what they think, that they smile at you in order to sharpen the knife with which they stab you. And he suffered terribly when he finally realised that he had been betrayed again. But that didn’t stop him from believing the words of others. Nor did he try to decipher the evil intent in their actions.

A few hours before he died, he told me for the first time about his close relative who had tried to deceive him in various ways, to take advantage of him, to hatch a plot that had caused us all enough trouble: “Leave her, she is just pretending!” Was it a clarity that comes from being close to death? Did he mean to say that he had not been deceived, but that his forbearance knew no bounds? It was the only time I had ever heard him speak like that, bitterly, with a kind of boredom, as when annoying facts are repeated over and over again.

I think he was so deeply rooted in faith that he loved people because they were God’s creation. Because he couldn’t help loving and respecting those whom the Creator had called His sons, even when they crucified Him on the cross. Because they were his brothers in the Lord and he considered himself responsible for each one of them, as any altar server should.

Until his last days, dozens of people came to him for help. He wrote letters of recommendation, intervened, made phone calls, helped them with money. Not one of them left without my father having done everything he could for them. They weren’t afraid to come at impossible hours without thinking they were disturbing him. He would get out of bed, old and tired, early in the morning, late in the evening, late in the afternoon, when he wanted to rest. He interrupted his work, his rest, to receive people he had never seen, but who knew he would not leave his house without help.

“Leave the poor man alone, he’s in trouble,” he would say, “maybe he’s not from Bucharest, maybe he’s just come by train and has to go back…” he tried so hard to find excuses, to make excuses. But I am sad to say that many of them, having reached their destination, forgot that a “thank you” was necessary.

The ingratitude, especially from some of his former students, saddened him beyond measure. “So many people come to me,” he said bitterly, “but how many of those whom I considered my disciples should have visited me more often, as they did when they needed me? Perhaps I didn’t care enough to build their character. Or maybe I didn’t know how to win their affection.

Secretary of the Archdiocese

About three months later, the Patriarch appointed him secretary of the archdiocese. He left at seven in the morning and returned at four in the afternoon, sharing an office with Father Anania, the future bishop.

After 1964, when Gheorghiu-Dej broke away from the Soviet Union and promoted a policy of so-called independence, the situation became easier. The party line changed. It began to open up to the West, whose sympathy was eagerly sought. A number of cultural figures, whose prestige had transcended the country’s borders, were brought out of obscurity. The West needed to see that détente was not just empty words.

On the other hand, the ecumenical movement had developed and, in this context, the Department of Religious Affairs asked the Patriarchate for active participation in this movement. Father had to write reports representing the position of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the ecumenical dialogue, and Director Nendu of the Department of Religious Affairs asked: “Who wrote it?”

– Stăniloae, he was told.

– Is he the one who was in prison?

– Yes, yes.

– Very good report, excellent.

The authorities began to understand why the foreigners were always talking about my father.

Once again Professor at the Theological Institute 

In the autumn he was appointed professor at the Institute, teaching a course in dogmatics for doctoral students.

In the summer, Dumitraș and I went to the sea, because he always had problems with his tonsils. My father also bought a ticket to Techirghiol, to the Patriarch’s house. Almost every day he came to visit us in Constanța, or we went to visit him. The years in prison had taken their toll and his rheumatism was beginning to bother him, so mud baths were recommended. Unfortunately, the cold baths didn’t help and he developed bronchitis, which became chronic and tormented him, with short interruptions, until he died.

The general atmosphere had also changed. Political prisoners were released. There were no more arrests. There was a semblance of legality, and we were no longer so afraid. I went to school without fear, and I no longer trembled when the headmaster called me, expecting him to tell me that he knew who I was and that I no longer belonged there.

People came to us again. No one turned their heads in the street and pretended not to see us.

Slowly, slowly, my father got used to freedom, to the normality of life “outside”, and stopped buying huge quantities of bread.

With his return home, the joy of the holidays returned. […]

No parish house for Stăniloae family

A few years passed. Dumitraș was growing up, he could no longer fit into his crib, and the three small rooms were completely overcrowded.

My father again made a timid attempt to find a place in a parish house, but in fact, whenever he asked, there were none available. There had been one in this parish, but it had just been occupied. What a pity!

“When might another place become available?” he asked.

“We don’t know, maybe in a week, maybe in a year…”

There was no hope for that part, so we tried to get state housing, but without serious hemorrhoids, Dumitraș would have retired before he got it. I applied and knocked on the doors of ICRAL until my feet were dry.

The answer was always: “Wait your turn!” When that turn would come was a mystery no human mind could unravel. The corridors were filled with people who had been waiting for years. We were told to “wag our ears”. But how? There were so many officials sending you from one to another. It was like being in a jungle full of traps with no way out. [So we started looking for something to buy. That is, a flat that wasn’t too expensive and that we could pay for in instalments. […]

After a few years of looking, we found an apartment in a block in Calea Călărași, next to Mântuleasa Street.

My father and I often passed it on our Sunday walks, and I never dared to dream that I could live in such a house. We imagined how happy the inhabitants of such a house must be. “Tough,” my father said. “Such a place costs a lot of money.”

Now we had found a flat in that very block. No doubt no one could be unhappy or sick there, no one could die for example…

After we moved in, I saw that I was wrong. And there lived people like all people, with their problems, their worries, their troubles… Then, during the damned eighties, the block fell into disrepair, and when I saw it again many years later, I couldn’t believe it: dirty, untidy, a real mess!

But it looked different then. The flat was nice, but too small for the four of us. So it was just going to be us, Dumitraș and me. Especially as it was quite close to where my parents lived, and they had to stay put.

As the owners were desperate to sell, the deal went through smoothly and Dad paid instalments for about three years afterwards. But we were used to it. My mother was also very unhappy that we were no longer living together. But there was no other way. We were on the road all day, at each other’s houses, and Dumitraș, who was now at school, spent part of his time at her house when I was at work.

After a few months we got used to our home, which seemed like heaven on earth. We had central heating and the whole house was warm. We didn’t shiver in the bathroom and our hands didn’t freeze under the tap because we had hot water. It was a dream home. We were very happy when we came home.

My father used to come over, put his hands on the radiator and say: “It’s so warm and nice here. That’s what I call home!”

The most profound Romanian theology, written in a “glacier”.

Unfortunately, as a compensation, it was getting colder and colder.

Pastor Petrescu had decided to introduce oil heaters, both in the church and in the house. My parents were very happy, they gave up their cellar to install the boiler there and paid a very high share of the costs. As usual, my father was reluctant to ask for these documents.

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as we had hoped. I don’t know if it was a fault with the installation. Apparently it was designed so that a lever would direct the hot water in the desired direction. In any case, there was almost no heat coming into my parents’ house. Everything went through the pipes to the church and the flats upstairs. It was very hot there. Downstairs it was as cold as outside. As you couldn’t even make a fire in the stoves, the flat became a real freezer. My father sat at his desk, hat on his head, coat over his shoulders, gloves on, writing. All their pleas to keep warm, to keep the house warm, were in vain. When it was very cold, they came to us. But even that was no solution. He had the books, the manuscripts, and he couldn’t carry them all from one place to another every day.

Desperate, they decided to look for something to buy so they could move out. Dad’s sciatica was getting worse and sometimes he couldn’t get out of his chair. It was a torture to get out of bed in the morning and straighten his back.

A different standard of living. In the “luxury” of a studio flat

We went looking again. We had just paid off the debt on our flat and money was tight. Finally, we found this double studio in Strada Cernica, very close to us. Again, instalments followed.

There were two small rooms, one of which had no windows. But there was a gas heater and it was warm. A small kitchenette, barely big enough for the four of us, completed the house. But because it was a real kitchen, it had running water, even hot and cold, a luxury my mother had lost in the decades they had lived in Calea Moșilor. Gone were the days when she carried water in buckets.

So they moved there. It was difficult at first, especially for my mother. It was very narrow, narrower than before, and the atmosphere was strange. But after a while they began to feel at home. The neighbours were nice, friendly. When they went out the door, they no longer felt strange stares directed at them. […]

Dad’s rheumatic pains eased. He was unbearably happy and in the morning, when he got out of bed, he said: “It’s good to be warm in the house! God, what a good thing it is to have a radiator that works!”

A lot of people started to come in again, and there was a real coming and going in the two rooms. My father told what he had seen abroad after he had started to leave the country, and everyone was amazed: “What a world, sir! What a life!”

The PhD students came. Priests and monks came from everywhere. Students from other faculties came, intellectuals who read the Philokalia. […]

A wind of relaxation was blowing. Discreet allusions to past mistakes and exaggerations were made in all official speeches. (Unfortunately, towards the end of the seventies, there were new exaggerations, new forms of repression, culminating in a paroxysm that made the country resemble a huge lunatic asylum. All this is known).

In this context, my father began to hope again that he would be able to publish. But it was not until 1976 that he was able to print his Philokalia, the fifth volume, and then, in 1978, his monumental Dogmatica. The Course on Asceticism and Mysticism did not appear until 1981, as the third volume of Moral Theology, as the word ‘mysticism’ was still ostracised. I shall return to these events.

As I said, Romania needed friends in those years. So many people of culture were sent abroad to congresses and other cultural events.

Lecturer in the free world

My father’s first trip abroad was in the spring of 1967, to Germany, at the invitation of Professor Miron of the University of Freiburg, to give lectures.

We were very excited. First, the sight of the passport filled us with admiration. Never before had we held in our hands such a gateway to an unknown world of which we had heard so much. These few pages that allowed you to see things you couldn’t even imagine, to escape from a reality that had brought nothing but pain and fear! What kind of people were those who lived in freedom on the other side? […]

My father looked at it for a long time and turned it over. He looked at the photo and read the name, as if to make sure it was really his. I think he was as excited as I was. He just didn’t show it. “How changeable a man’s destiny is, and how many surprises life throws at you,” he said.

He left on the international train at seven in the evening. I went with him to the station. […]

He left dressed as a priest: “I’m a priest, these are my clothes and I’m not ashamed of them!” Colleagues who had experience of travelling in the West advised him to dress in civilian clothes: “The Germans will look at your garments as if you were from another country and think you are from Africa, God knows where!” “That’s all right, go ahead!” Dad left dressed in his “garments”. No one blamed him, on the contrary.

He told us afterwards that he was often stopped in the street and greeted with respect and friendship. There were Saxons settled in Freiburg who were happy to see a face from the old homeland. They were natives who were sympathetic to Orthodoxy.

An old lady stopped him in the street and asked him to pray for her. He spoke to her in Romanian:

– Father, aren’t you from Romania?

– Yes, yes, my father replied.

– You see, my husband has died, the woman continued with tears in her eyes. I can’t console myself at all. Can you pray for me, even if I am an evangelical person?

– Of course, my father replied, tell me your name.

The woman offered him money.

– No, no, Dad replied, no need.

– I knew from my countrymen that if you don’t pay for a prayer, it won’t be heard, she continued.

– Don’t worry, madam, God doesn’t ask whether it’s paid for or not…

He was particularly impressed by one young woman:

– You are Orthodox, of course, he told her. You are dressed like the Greek priests. Where are you from?

– From Romania.She had a very sick child and asked my father if she could say a prayer for him.

– And for us, the whole family. We’ve lost the tradition…

Other trips followed. Paris, England, Germany…

In Paris he met Olivier Clément, the journalist who, as I said, had interviewed Andrei Scrima. The French writer had undoubtedly no blame. In the West, freedom of expression and freedom of the press were sacrosanct, and no one could believe that things were different elsewhere. For Western democracies, it was unthinkable that you could not have your own opinions, your own beliefs, and that these could constitute a crime for which you could be punished.

I have often been looked at with astonishment when I have reported on the situation in Romania. “Really? No, it can’t be!”

Later, after the collapse of the political system in the GDR, when the horrors that had taken place there came to light, the shock was great. “Please forgive me for not believing you!” I was told and called many times. “How can you imagine that such things can happen in Europe in our century? Now I know you were right.”

So Olivier Clément was not to be blamed. He had done his duty as an honest journalist who could not have foreseen the danger. But the tragedy in Romania had caused him great pain, and he told his father how much he regretted having published the interview. They remained good friends. Through his father, Olivier Clement became close to the Romanian Church and spirituality. In 1979 he received an honorary doctorate from the Theological Institute of Bucharest. He returned with his family in 1980. […]

The publication of his work was hindered by the censorship of the “Popular Democracy” and … the humiliation of the “Brothers of Faith”.

Since 1976, my father has been able to publish his works again. The fifth volume of the Philokalia, whose publication had been suspended after 1944, appeared. […]

Dad was happy to see the books he had worked on for so long in print again, without the prospect of them being published. In all the years of silence, an impressive number of manuscripts had accumulated on his desk.

The hope that one by one they would all see the light of print gave him wings. His age – he was over seventy – did not prevent him from taking on new projects, from thinking about other subjects that preoccupied him. I’ve mentioned this before. He used to tell us all the time: “I want to write a book on Jesus Christ. Other than Jesus Christ and the Restoration of Man. One that would include contemporary theology and the Christology of the Holy Fathers… A book on the Mother of God. And one on the Liturgy. It is only with age and life experience that one begins to understand the wealth of meaning hidden in it. How many listen to it every week, attentive to the gestures of the priest, the beauty of his voice and the chants, and let slip the deep meanings that make it the most complete lesson in theology…”. He is also working on a book on the Holy Trinity. […]

God helped and fulfilled these wishes. He wrote these books. And many others. Some that death did not allow him to publish, but which we hope will see the light of print.

All this is known. Less well known, perhaps, are the difficulties he encountered, the obstacles he had to overcome in the long and far from easy process, which resembled a constant struggle to get one manuscript and another printed… It only ended after 1989. Which is not to say that the publishing problems were over…

There were also obstacles from “outside” authorities. For example, the censors objected to the use of the word “man” in the text of the Dogmatics. They did not want it to be understood that all people were religious and concerned about their relationship with God. It was therefore demanded that the word “man” be replaced everywhere by “believer”. It was therefore necessary to speak of the “believer’s” faith, the “believer’s” aspiration and encounter with the divine, and so on. Or, at most, of the “believer”. Because, according to the sectology department, sectarian writings are not only of interest to those who believe in God, i.e. a limited number of people who still have “backward ideas”. Not modern man with “advanced” ideas. That is why the first edition of the Dogmatics always speaks of the “believer” or, at best, the “man of faith”.

What could my father do? He had the choice of accepting to appear like this or not appearing at all. He tried in vain to convince the authorities that such a change was absurd. But he had no choice. For days, he and an official from the department read page after page and made the necessary changes. The censors had no further objections and Dogmatica was published.

But there were also difficulties within the publishing house.

“Why do you write so much?” they asked in a very rude way, to put it mildly. “Why do you write so much? Don’t you have anything else to do at home?”

I remember one time when he came home from the Bible Institute with tears in his eyes. “Give me a break!” said the then director of the publishing house, Verzan. “Stop with all these books! Why do you want to print so many? I have other things to do now. I have to bring out the Baptist Bible, for which I’m getting money. Don’t you have other work to do?”

“Is this really the way they should be telling me off? Is this really where I should expect having such a hard time?”

Everyone in the house was outraged. “Why don’t you go to his superiors and talk? It’s not his personal business!” Dad waved his hand: “Never mind, what’s the use!?”

He sat down at the table. There was no direct light in the room and he had to keep a small desk lamp on. Or he could write at the bedroom table and then move the piles of papers and manuscripts around at lunchtime. Either way, getting back to his thoughts was the best comfort he could find against the daily misery. He sought refuge in a realm that was his own, where no one brushed him aside, where no one looked at him strangely, where ideas were his faithful friends. He put them down on paper and they rewarded him with the satisfaction of giving people a different perspective on life.

Between the ailments of the body and the small pleasures of life

His eyes began to redden. I persuaded him to write on the table behind. We now ate in the cramped kitchen, where one of us had to come out when we reached for a fork in the drawer. Only at the major holidays, Easter and Christmas, would the bedroom table be cleared for a few hours.

Although there was some improvement, his eyes continued to bother him. So he often went to see Dr Vasiliu, an excellent ophthalmologist, who gave him all kinds of drops. Later, I always sent him Berberil, which helped. In addition, he had started to grow some upturned eyelashes and Mrs Vasiliu regularly removed them. It was rather unpleasant. But the eyelashes always grew in the same way and he had no choice. […]

They lived modestly and quietly. As always, my father got up very early in the morning and sat down at the desk. “It’s good to be warm,” he used to say, very happy. They had breakfast around eight. Dad drank mint tea. Since he had been released from prison, he had had some problems with his stomach, he who once boasted, “I could eat stones with my stomach!”

I kept asking him how he’d been. I thought that now, after some time, he would tell us if he had been ill-treated. He always smiled: “It wasn’t that bad!”

– Didn’t it hurt when they operated on your hernia without anaesthetic?

– Well, it worked!

In fact, he had to have another hernia operation at the end of the seventies. And this later gave rise to some alegories whose meaning is hard to grasp. But I’ll get to that later.

Asceticism, a way of life in the Stăniloae family

He liked to put a drop of brandy in his tea. “Tea is so good,” he used to say. “I could live on bread and tea alone!”

On sweet days he would eat a little cheese or curd. When he was fasting, two or three olives, if there were any. If not, my mother would toast bread and drizzle a little oil on it.

They were very strict about this. They fasted every day of the year, on Wednesdays and Fridays. My mother also fasted on Mondays, as she had learned from my grandmother.

Once, while passing through Arad, we were invited to lunch at the home of the local bishop. It was a Friday and we were not given lent food. There were many guests and the cook outdid herself. My father ate the chicken soup and everything that followed. And the late bishop excused himself by saying that travellers have the blessing not to fast. But my mother didn’t touch any of the food and only ate some bread. After the meal, my father asked her: “Why didn’t you want to eat? That’s right, as the bishop says, the travellers have the blessing not to fast.” “I know,” my mother replied. “But I won’t eat in spite of all the blessings and all the bishops in the world.” “And I swallowed with lumps, what do you think? But I couldn’t put the bishop in an uncomfortable position. How would he have felt? The man wanted us to be as welcome as possible!” Mother shrugged.

After breakfast, Dad would go to college, or, especially after he retired, he would go back to his desk. He didn’t have much peace, because the daily back and forth began.

“Many come to the spring to drink”

At the end of the sixties, when political détente had become a fact, some writers, painters and musicians began to come to my father’s house. Some of them were driven by curiosity, others by various interests, others by a sincere desire to come into contact with Romanian spirituality, which they knew only vaguely. There were also those who were looking for “sources of inspiration”, which they found in abundance in conversations with my father. It happened quite often that after such a visit, the next day little essays or verses would appear in Luceafărul or România literară, containing exactly what my father had said the day before. They were usually written in the vernacular, which gave them an air of “spirituality”, of “sincerity”, and which, in those days, gave them an originality that pleased the reader and aroused sympathy for the author.

People would immediately come in waving the magazine: “Father Professor, he has copied you again… without quoting you… …. Why don’t you do something?”

Father smiled: “Many come to the spring to quench their thirst”…

But I’ll come back to that.

There were many people from the Theological Institute when my father was a teacher. After he retired, the number of them diminished, and I can honestly say, as I have already said, that my father was distressed about it.

Sometimes I had something to talk to them about. We would go into the bedroom, my father would stop writing and we would talk for a long time. Mum would come in from the kitchen and the three of us would advise each other on what to do and how to do it. Or we’d just tell stories. How nice those quiet hours were! How reassuring it was to know that there, in that little room with the glass icons on the walls that I remembered from my childhood, with the candle always burning, were two people who really loved me, whom I could trust completely, from whom I could get good advice, to whom I could say anything.

When Dumitraș came home from school, he would tell us what had happened that day. We were not alone. Between us and the harsh reality, they stood, devoted, full of care, our bulwark against the blows, always able to help us, defend us, protect us.

Even when circumstances separated us, the certainty of their love remained and sustained us in difficult times. We didn’t see them, but we talked on the phone at least once a week and knew that they WERE, there, in those little rooms that were always present in our hearts and eyes.

We never felt, as we did when Dad died, that our immaculate bulwark was no more, that we were left alone, exposed to absurd adversity that nothing could justify. In those days, at my father’s catafalque, we received enough blows below the belt to last us the rest of our lives. And I remembered his words: “Go away, after my death no one will protect you!”

He had been very puzzled that all his natural kindness, his warmth of heart, his desire to help others and his boundless trust in people had brought him nothing but false affection from some people, which was crushed when they no longer expected any support from him. When he retired, he was, as they say, “put on hold”.

When titanic work arouses envy

The enormous life’s work with which he enriched Romanian theology and brought it international prestige has aroused envy, backbiting and hatred blows, not only against him but also against his followers. This, especially after Dumitraș had decided to study theology… There was hardly a conversation with him, either in person or by telephone, in which he did not confess his disappointment.

But the years he spent in Strada Cernica were the best. He was able to publish again, albeit with difficulty and emotion. Thanks to a certain political stability, the threat of the previous years, the total uncertainty, had disappeared. My mother had recovered, and we were no longer at risk of relapse or of the contamination of others in the house. […]

Unfortunately, among a few, very few, it is true, among the Romanians, an anachronistic resentment of intolerance, even hatred, stemming from a fanaticism that has no place in a civilised society, manifested itself in numerous blows below the belt, which not only my father but also we received.

Officially, they were Orthodox. Some of them had studied theology and had even become university professors. They couldn’t touch my father. He had too much authority, at home and abroad, in and out of the ecumenical movement. Instead, we were vulnerable. I received many insults, including from literary critics who did not like the name.

“Why are you cursing his book?” Pituț asked a reviewer for a literary magazine in Timișoara. “It’s only good!” “Yes, it’s true,” he replied, “I have nothing against the book, but I don’t like the name!”

But it was Dumitraș, more than me, who was further away anyway, who suffered the most injustice. They could beat him at will.

He had graduated from a classical language school where Latin was widely spoken. He was fluent in Ancient Greek, which he had studied for four years as his main subject. He knew two modern languages from home and spoke them almost perfectly. He had no shortage of theological and philosophical reading. This didn’t stop his Latin teacher from declaring that he would “never pass”. “I’ll show Stăniloae! Is he sending his grandson to study theology?”

Everyday misery took on silly forms. It was hard to believe that a university professor could indulge in such childish banter: “What, you think if you’re Stăniloae’s nephew you can wear a grey hat? Go away from the table! And I’ll confiscate your hat!” shouted Father Floca. And this in a dining hall full of students.

A few years earlier I had bought him a hat with rabbit ears from Bulgaria. It was very cheap, two leva, and I was glad because it would protect his ears. All his childhood he had suffered from otitis, pharyngitis, tonsillitis, and the doctors had warned him to keep out of the cold.

And so on and so on… My father became very angry and at the end of the semester Dumitraș was transferred to Bucharest. “I thought that after all the trouble they had caused me in the past, at least now, after so many years, it would be different. In every family, the tradition of the profession continues. Doctors send their children into medicine, archaeologists into archaeology. In England, officers make it a point of honour to send their sons to military school… Don’t I have the right to send my only offspring to study theology?”.

Dumitraș graduated in the spring of 1982. There he found some wonderful young men with whom he remained friends. And among the professors there were some whom he respected both for their professional training and for their human qualities.

In the autumn, he took the entrance exam for doctoral studies.

It began, as usual, at eight in the morning. At two, Dumitraș had not arrived. “What’s wrong with him?” my father wondered. “It should be over by now!” By four o’clock we were beginning to worry. “It shouldn’t take this long!”

He picked up the phone to call the Holy Synod in Antim Monastery, where the exam was being held. What was going on? No, it wasn’t over yet, he was told. The commission had been changed overnight. Professors from Sibiu were brought in to rule out the possibility of interference…

“It was not the initiative of the Ministry. “Someone” intervened there to change the teachers,” he was told. “An ‘impartial’ commission was set up, supposedly!”

“Ah, so that’s what it was. ‘Someone’ very much wants to keep Dumitraș out of the doctorate. I haven’t even died yet and they’ve already started. What will become of him when I’m gone, if they go so far as to change a whole committee, thinking that this will make it difficult for me! As if I had appointed my own committee! Is that possible? It’s not as if I have to intervene on his behalf!”

Dad was black with rage. “I’ve swallowed so much in my life,” he said. “So much misery, irony and innuendo! Now they are starting doing the same thing with Dumitraș! Enough is enough!”

“Don’t ever come back”

That was the first time he said to me: “Lidia, you have to leave. There’s no point staying here. I won’t have long to live and then… God knows what they’ll do! Leave at the first opportunity and don’t come back! You go too. What’s the point of helping alone? You here, him there! It’ll be hard, but you’ll make your own way. At least you won’t have anyone to fight with. No one to help you, but no one to follow you. Who knows what they’re doing and what they’re up to! Can’t you see there’s nothing to stop them?”

(In one respect he was wrong. Some “friends” did look after us from afar. Whenever they visited us at congresses or meetings, they did not forget to whisper all sorts of insults against us into the ears of the German theologians. They were “theologians” whom my father had helped to get a doctorate, a chair, a career. But most of them were useless. They aroused indignation, as they deserved, and were then passed on to us).

No, I didn’t. I was just scared. “Not to be together anymore?” I asked. “Not to see each other? Impossible. Only when you come!” “We’re old and can’t change our lives. You’re young, it’s different for you. You’ll have to do it. It is your duty to help your child! Anyway, we won’t always be together”. “OK, we’ll talk about it.”

For a moment I thought he was angry at the ingratitude of people, at the absurdity of the situation. No, he wasn’t. Slowly, slowly, the evidence was accumulating. My father was right again. “You must find a favourable moment. And we’ll see each other, God willing…”

At eleven o’clock that night, Dumitraș finished his exam. He was tired, but satisfied that it had gone well. He had no idea that it wasn’t actually the original committee. “We were surprised that they weren’t our teachers,” he told us. “But we thought they must have been teachers from another institute…”

My father had arranged countless scholarships for students in Germany, France, Switzerland and England. Now there was nothing for Stăniloae’s grandson.

“I can’t do that,” replied the counsellor in charge of scholarships. “I have nothing available. Another time, maybe next year…”

Finally, the Metropolitan of Crete offered him a scholarship. After about a week of sitting in front of the councillor’s office from morning to afternoon, he was reluctantly given the go-ahead. A year and a half later, in the spring of 1984, I left too. The hard and sad years of exile began.

The night before I left, I had visited friends. As I was leaving, I was escorted to the tram: “Lidia, you now have the rare opportunity to be with Dumitraș. Don’t come back. As a journalist, I know some things I’d rather not tell you. It’s going to get worse and worse. And I’ll try to get my children out of danger. That’s all I want. He hugged me, “I don’t want to see you here again. Maybe somewhere else. And I haven’t told you anything…”

I told Dad. “Yes,” he replied. “Exactly what I wanted to tell you. Don’t come back under any circumstances. Look where we’re headed. It’s no use, it’s getting worse every day. And it’ll only get worse. The day will come when I won’t be here and there won’t be anyone to help you. Even now… Since I retired, it’s over. Do you still see anyone coming or calling? Now I feel like a dead end…”

Indeed, contact with the Institute had greatly diminished. From 1980, when the ninth volume of the Philokalia appeared, until 1987, when the first volume of the writings of St. Athanasius the Great was printed, nothing was published in Bucharest. Between 1985 and 1987, Metropolitan Nestor of Craiova printed two of his original works there: Spirituality and Communion in the Orthodox Liturgy, the work on the liturgy he had long planned, and The Immortal Face of God.

Only a few of his former students visited him. The future Metropolitan of Moldavia, Daniel Ciubotea, did not forget to visit him whenever he came to the country. Father was very happy. He considered his doctoral student, Ciubotea, to be the most precious of his disciples, of extraordinary quality.

That didn’t mean that the house wasn’t full, as always: monks, priests from all over the country, various intellectuals, a host of people who had grown fond of my parents and visited them almost daily.

He had also stopped going abroad. He was no longer a member of any of the working committees of the ecumenical movement and was constantly being asked questions, either by telephone or in writing: “Why don’t you participate anymore, Professor? I was waiting for you at the last meeting! You are missed!” (Of course, materials were requested. My father would write various interventions on the topics to be discussed, but then others would leave with the material, as was the case, for example, at the big meeting in Vancouver).

He went away again in 1982 at the express invitation of the Theological Faculty of the University of the South in Chicago.

He was very reluctant to make such a long journey at his age. So I accompanied him, Dumitraș and myself. As I said, he endured the trip better than we did. He gave several lectures, attended meetings and receptions, and met Mircea Eliade, who was a professor of the history of religion at the same university. […]

The death of his wife

On 22 March 1993 I received a telephone call from my father. I had been calling him every evening since my return. It was midday and my father had beaten me to it. He was crying on the phone: my mother had just died. The funeral was on Wednesday.

“Couldn’t you move it to Thursday?” I asked. “I don’t know how I’m going to get there on Wednesday. There is no plane on Tuesday.”

No, it wasn’t possible. The funeral was on Wednesday at two o’clock. […]

So I called Bucharest. I couldn’t come by plane until the next day. I asked someone to wait for me. To be a little late for the service so that I could go to the cemetery.

That’s what happened. When I landed, I was told that the service in the church was about to end and that the funeral procession would leave for the cemetery in a few minutes. [The cortege had left the house. So we went straight to the cemetery and got there first. […]

My mother looked so small in the coffin, like a child. She had a quiet, peaceful face, almost smiling under the black lace on her forehead that she had kept for many years.

And my father had lost a lot of weight. In the few weeks that I hadn’t seen him, he had aged like a century.

We embraced, crying, and walked away on the arm of the coffin. We’d walked together before, like this, at Mioare’s funeral. He supported me then. I was small and he was an old man, sad but strong. He had an arm to lean on. Now he walked with tired, small steps. An old man beyond sad, heartbreaking. He cried softly, turned inwards, absent from everything around him, except the coffin in which lay the one who had been his support, his help, his lifelong hope. He was more with her than with us, and I felt that he was preparing for the same journey.

And my mother, dear mother! God had heard her prayer, which she addressed to Him every day: “Lord, let me die first!”

In those moments I told myself I would never hear her loving, worried voice again: “Dress well, don’t catch cold! Dumitre, you’re sweating, get changed. What did you do at school today, Tataș?” Could life go on as before?

All those pious questions, those everyday concerns for us that were the very meaning of their existence, had gone with her. Just as the most beautiful part of our lives had gone, with the warmth, the joy, the feeling that we belonged to a privileged place: one where the fundamental law was love and devotion, the feeling that you were not alone, whatever happened… […]

My father stayed by my side until the last moment. It was as if he was attending his own funeral, curious to see how things would go.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Yes, yes, right away.”

I eventually left on his arm, but I knew that part of him was still there and it wouldn’t be long before he was resting next door.

It had been an uplifting ceremony, painful but uplifting, a beginning rather than an end. Sadness was mingled with hope, with the conviction that my mother, with her usual gentleness and patience, had passed through all the suffering and was now rejoicing in the light that never sets.

In the twilight of old age

Almost six months had passed. We were a week away from leaving for Romania. We had both taken our holidays and were going to visit my father.

On Monday I went shopping for Bucharest. [On my return I found Dumitraș, who had come home in the meantime, with a green face. I thought he was worried about me and I prepared to explain.

“Mariana called,” he said. “My father has cancer. They’ve admitted him and they’re going to operate tomorrow.” […]

How? Out of the blue? He had been admitted to the Elias Hospital in June for routine tests. He had some problems with his prostate, but nothing serious, he told us.

Just like that?

I sat down. Suddenly my legs wouldn’t support me anymore. I automatically dialled the number in Bucharest, from home. No one answered. I called Mariana.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true. They found stomach cancer. They admitted him today and they want to operate tomorrow. The father was reluctant, but the doctor and Father Bordașiu insisted, so they finally convinced him. Doctor Bogdan Miron wants to speak to you. He asks you to call him…”

Dr. Bogdan Miron was a well-known doctor. He often came to my father’s house and I had known him for years. I found him only in the evening. A few days earlier, he had taken my father to the city hospital for a thorough check-up. He had stomach cancer and needed an emergency operation.

“Okay, but in June they did all sorts of tests on him at Elias. How come they didn’t find anything?”

He didn’t know. But now it was clear. If they didn’t operate, there was a risk that from one day to the next his stomach would be blocked and he wouldn’t be able to eat. So he had to be operated on, and he needed our consent. […]

On Wednesday we got on the plane. It wasn’t the first time I had travelled with tears in my eyes.

I had phoned the night before. Yes, my father had survived the operation.

[Dad had been given a room next to the recovery room. He was calm, his face was good and it was as if he hadn’t even been through the operation.

Then a young doctor came in and told us that the head of the ward wanted to see us. He welcomed us with great care. Unfortunately, the operation had not been as successful as they had hoped. The cancer had spread.

“Why did you open him then? Wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t go through the shock of the operation?”

They didn’t know. He gave us all sorts of technical details. I’ll skip the details. “Does Dad know?” I asked. No, they hadn’t told him. He was convinced everything had gone smoothly. “Let’s keep it that way. Please don’t tell him. What’s the point of making him unhappy?”

He advised us to leave him in hospital. There he had qualified help. There was always a nurse in the next room, and the doctors came to see him all the time. It was better to keep him under medical supervision. […]

After about a week his health began to deteriorate. He was increasingly tired. He was given fluids and antibiotics because the metastases had spread to his lungs and he was having trouble breathing. Of course, he was hooked up to all sorts of tubes and machines, as is usual in such cases.

He felt sick. He couldn’t stand all the visitors and he kept telling us: “Don’t let so many people come to me. I’m too tired, I don’t want everyone to come, known and unknown. You come…” He gave us a few names of people he wanted to see. That’s all.

In his hospital bed, between family protection and admirers harassment

I saw once again the unconscious cruelty of curiosity. Just like after an accident, the curious rush in to watch. Maybe it’s the thrill of it, or an unconscious “good thing he’s there and not me” joy… I don’t know.

But we had some of the most uncomfortable moments, because we literally had to fight the people who rushed in, without shyness, without pity, without remorse. They didn’t think that there was a very old, very sick man in there who was suffering, who was dying and who wanted to be at peace, at least in the last moments of his life. […]

Finally, I asked the head nurse, a woman of great fairness, serious and responsible, not to allow any more visitors. Some were persuaded, others not. One lady came with a fifteen-year-old boy. She wanted the boy to see his father.

“Madam,” I begged her, “please respect his wish. He is very ill, very tired and doesn’t want to see anyone else.”

“Yes, but I want my boy to see him. He may be dying and I want him to see him first.”

“See what, ma’am? An old man, after a major operation, hooked up to all kinds of tubes and machines, barely able to breathe? Do you think someone on the verge of death is a pleasant sight for a teenager? Is that what you want them to remember? There are so many pictures of him, what he looked like when he was healthy and strong. That’s how they should remember him, keep him in their minds. And especially to read what he wrote, if he wants to get a true picture of Stăniloae”. […]

[Father] asked us to find a lawyer to supervise the way his books were printed. He was very unhappy about the poaching of publishing, which even in his lifetime had become so extensive that it was out of control. “I feel old,” he said, “and I don’t have the strength to deal with it. You have to do something. Get a lawyer who specialises in this kind of thing and put things in order”.

He was very pleased when we told him that we had done exactly what he had asked. “Very good, there are very few people you can trust these days. I wouldn’t have thought…”

Entering eternity

On the evening of the fourth of October, the Patriarch came with Metropolitan Daniel of Moldavia and other hierarchs and celebrated Holy Unction for him. The Patriarch had come to the hospital several times before and the porter was deeply impressed.

“I don’t know who is admitted up there,” he said, not knowing us. “It must be someone very big for the Patriarch to come to him…”[…].

At eleven o’clock the telephone rang. I knew something had happened before I answered it. Yes, my father had just died…

I immediately called Father Galeriu. Father had told us that he wanted Father Bordașiu to be with him to wash and dress him in case he died. It’s customary for a priest to perform this sad service.

We woke him up from his sleep. We apologised and asked him to call Father Bordașiu, who lived next door, to come to the hospital. […]

We took the bag with the things we had prepared, the vestments, the new Gospel, the kukulion, found a taxi and went to Father Galeriu’s, who lived very close by. We rang at the door: “Father, we have arrived.”

We waited in the car and after about 45 minutes we left for the hospital. Father Bordașiu followed us in his own car, which the lady always drove so that he had something to go home in.

Dad was resting in his bed. His face was peaceful, as if he were asleep. Only he had shrunk even more. All the time he had been getting smaller and smaller, day by day, as if the earthly part had realised its own weakness and was gradually making way for something else, for something immortal, imperishable, that which should remain alive….

As I wept and kissed his cold forehead, I knew that I would never again hear his weak voice, that I would never again feel his loving gaze fixed on me, that I would never again have the certainty that, whatever happened, my father was beside me and that nothing bad could happen to me.

Yes, life was moving inexorably towards an irreversible, merciless end that was beginning to take shape.

The students had written down their last words and gave them to us. […]

I’d like to make one thing clear. It has been said everywhere that the date of his death was Tuesday 5 October 1993. This is not correct. My father died on Monday 4 October 1993 at around 11 pm.

Early the next morning I called the Patriarch. Father told us: “If I die, tell the Patriarch immediately. The Patriarchate will organise the funeral”. […]

The funeral

At the end of the Liturgy, a large group of priests in vestments, who were to serve at the funeral, took the coffin and carried it outside with the gestures with which they once stormed the enemy’s fortress. They placed it at the foot of the steps of the Patriarchal Palace, where my father waited humbly for his funeral prayers to be read from the steps.

After about a quarter of an hour, with the help of several priests in vestments who joined the group of servants, we and all the relatives made our way to the coffin. We had given up hope of being with my father’s body at the funeral.

The words we both repeated most often that day were: “We would rather have taken him to Vlădeni…”

Perhaps I will be reproached for the fact that my father was so well known that he was, so to speak, part of the national heritage. So we had to accept that his funeral was a public event and not a family affair.

It’s true that my father didn’t just belong to us. We’ve known that for a long time and we’ve always accepted it. I understood why so many people wanted to say goodbye to him on his last journey. But for us, he was a beloved and loving father and grandfather. And we had at least as much right as others to say goodbye to him in silence and remembrance, as happens everywhere, we had the right to tears and grief, to tender feelings and sadness, which, although they tear the soul apart, soothe it through that very tear. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows what I mean.

This right has been taken away from us. We have been deprived of this possible consolation. We were not included in the great mourning, although we were the ones who bore it. Something was taken away, not only from us, but also from my mother, who became an abstract symbol, a theoretical example, perhaps admired, perhaps envied, very well known, a photograph published in magazines, a name on the covers of her many books. But not a human being in her full normality, loving, devoted, who knew the complexity of life with all its joys and sorrows, precisely what makes great personalities even greater.

In the past he often read to us from the Letter to the Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love…” Then he would be silent, concentrated, his eyes half open, looking far away towards a point that only he knew. “This is it,” he said. “Love is the greatest gift, but also the greatest virtue”…

He often repeated, and I’m sure many of the regulars in the house heard him, that the viability of the faith in the Orthodox Church, the direct way it is lived by the people, concretely, not through dogmas and definitions far removed from the human soul, is due in large part to the fact that the priest knows from his own experience family life, with the joys, pains and sacrifices it brings. As a priest, he is also a human being like everyone else, and he can better understand the reality in which his faithful live. He does not remain somewhere on the sidelines, an impartial observer of weaknesses and problems, a cold researcher, uninvolved in the pains he is called to alleviate, in the joys he is called to understand.

Father Stăniloae, the Man

My father was such a man. Beyond intelligence, erudition, hard work, all the qualities typical of a great thinker and scholar, he was a human being in the noblest sense of the word, warm, gentle, an example of devotion and dedication. For all those with whom he came into contact and for whom he understood that with the gift of the priesthood he had also received a great responsibility before God. But also for those close to him, for his family, whom he loved above all.

Regardless of how others saw him, how they felt about him, it was their moral duty to understand him and to make others understand that St. Nicholas was not only a great theologian, but also a complete man, endowed by God with all that He wished to adorn the soul of His creature.

This would have been the truest, the most pious, the most appropriate homage to the mentor of Romanian spirituality, as he was called, from whom one should learn not only theology, but also humanity, with all that is pure and chosen in it, kindness, self-giving, characteristic traits of the overwhelming personality that was my father. […]

I often heard my father say: “I’m a priest, I can’t do that…” Or my mother: “Dad’s a priest, he can’t do that.” Or: “We are a family of priests and we have to act like a family of priests”.

That’s the most important thing I learned from them. I’ve seen them in so many different situations. Never, even in the most difficult situations, did they deviate one iota from a certain way of behaving, not out of formalism, not out of fanaticism or intolerance, but out of the firm conviction that the inner man and the outer man are not two different things, but one and the same. That “above all, you must be true to yourself”.

To yourself, to your faith, to your convictions, and above all to God, whom you loved and in whose light, I am sure, they now rejoice. Both of them.

(Lidia Stăniloae Ionescu – The light of the deed in the light of the word. Together with my father, Dumitru Stăniloae, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2010, pp. 28, 37-38, 41, 43-46, 49-54, 56, 62, 64-66, 139-140, 147, 170,172-174,177-178, 180, 183-188, 190-191, 201-202, 227-228, 230-231, 246, 249,252-253, 256-257, 272-280, 283, 287, 292-293, 296-304; 306-308; 311-318; 328-332; 334-335; 370-374; 397-409; 418-419, 427)

Note: The chapters are not part of the printed book. The division of the present memorial extract into chapters is our own.